Tag Archives: Gorge Harbour

History, Rivers & Oceans

When fishing was an industry in Whaletown

A great many fisherfolk once worked out of Whaletown. The Cortes Island Museum’s list goes back to the 1930s, at which point there were 7 men and a woman. Three of them used rowboats. 

“There used to be a huge fleet rafted out, both six and seven abreast all along  both sides of the dock, in Whaletown.  In the last 10 years or so, there’s only been three or four boats in there, fishing. The main one  that I know of in the last little while is the ‘C-Fin,’ but he goes outside of the Vancouver Island area and fishes tuna. When he comes back he doesn’t sell it to a fisheries, he sells it from the dock, and the same with his prawns.  So he’s not using a middle man to sell his products, which I suppose is one of the few ways you could make a little bit of money now,“ said Lynne Jordan, former President of the Cortes Island Museum, in the latest instalment of her history of Whaletown.

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Fire

Interview with Cortes Island’s new Interim Fire Chief

(Transcript of the radio program, with edits)

Eli McKenty had been Cortes Island’s Interim Fire Chief for 15 days when I interviewed him. He was actually the Department’s preferred choice as Fire Chief five months ago, but turned the job down, so they hired someone from Alberta. After five months of a six month trial period, the Cortes Island Fire Department came to the conclusion that ‘aspects of Dave Ives’ leadership style were at odds with the culture of our fire department’ and he was dismissed. McKenty agreed to be the Fire Chief until they can find a replacement. 

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Housing, Poverty, Rivers & Oceans

Trying to clean up Cortes Island’s abandoned boats and provide homes for the homeless 

There are probably a dozen abandoned boats on Cortes Island right now, and Dominic dos Santos would like to have them towed away.

“A lot of them are floating. Some of them just have no names on them. People just leave them there. it’s just been 15 years of ‘not my problem.’  We have fiberglass shards on every beach now because they abandon the boats and let ’em get destroyed on the rocks . All this stuff is gonna wind up on the beach in the next five, 10 years?” he said.

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History

Glacier-borne fossils in the Discovery Islands

Over the past 20 years, Christian Gronau has documented 149 fossiliferous rocks in our area. 

Fossil #144 was recently installed at the Cortes Island Museum, but the German-born and trained palaeontologist said, “Palaeontology became a question for me when I was settled here. I looked around, of course was interested in the local geology, and realized that Cortes is just a big pile of granite with very little exceptions to that rule and started wondering what I was going to do with my interest in fossils.”

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History

Birth of Whaletown as a community abt. 1885-1914

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Whaletown may get its name from an old whaling station, but Europeans really did not settle in the area for another 15 years or so. In today’s program Lynne Jordan, former President of the Cortes Island Museum, traces the modern community back to a logger named Moses Ireland.

First Nations people were using Whaletown Bay before that and a fish trap is believed to have once stretched across the entrance of the lagoon.

The whalers came for 18 months, in 1869 and 70.

“It wasn’t very many years after the whaling station left, in the mid 1880s,  that Moses Ireland moved into the area as a logger and set up camp where the whaling station had been,” explained Jordan.

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