By Mike Robinson For the past eight years I have been spending about 100 days per year at Skelhp, the Coast Salish place name for the waters around Saltery Bay.
The oldest archaeological sites in my neighbourhood indicate about 6,000 years of continuous, seasonal occupancy. What enabled this extraordinary period of coastal tenancy is extraordinary biodiversity.
Even today, the deep waters of Jervis Inlet are known for their spot shrimp, pink, coho, spring, and chum salmon and oysters and clams. Less well known are the local nursery bays and sounds where prolific populations of sea ducks and Canada geese spend their spring, rearing young under the watchful eyes of bald and golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, Northwestern crows, ravens, merlins and buzzards.
Town folk on the ferry and tourists in coffee shops comment frequently on how bad the fishing is compared to a few decades ago, and generally how stressed the marine environment has become. Down at Saltery Bay Government Wharf, however, a few of us have started to notice a change over the past two or three years. I hesitate to declare much, but I feel the duty to note something. That something is a sense that “some of it seems to be coming back.”
Two years ago in July, our family saw a ruckus off Scotch Fir Point. At first we thought it was gulls in large numbers. Soon the water was whipped up by something else—a massive pod of Pacific white-sided dolphins transiting north to south via the mouth of Jervis Inlet. As they spy-hopped and rolled right by our house, we counted about 200 of the swift small-toothed cetaceans. None of us had ever seen them before. Their accustomed range is Queen Charlotte Sound, up at the north end of Vancouver Island and offshore.
The next year, in May, came a pod of transient orcas to check out the growing numbers of California sea lions and harbour seals off McRae Islets. This year it was two minke whales spouting in a bay off the north shore of Nelson Island. Even a lone gray whale has been reported cruising in Hotham Sound nearby.
Some of my friends farther south are reporting big local stock herring spawns close to Squamish, and the Pacific white-sides have spent much time down there this past year in the vicinity of Keats, Bowen and Gambier islands. I have also heard about herring balls in Hotham Sound and farther up Jervis Inlet.
Given its primary role in supporting salmon and therefore California sea lions and orcas, a herring resurgence is a wonderful omen. In many ways this fish is the underpinning of the coastal ecosystem, and any recovery from the disastrous over-fishing of the past 30 years is a very welcome event.
What I hope is that a slow resurgence of Jervis Inlet aquatic life is starting to occur, driven by the local herring stock recovery. A lot of us think for the first time in a generation there is some ground for hope, and we are basing this hope on observed herring stocks. Now, if we can just let them recover, the whole coastal food chain will benefit.
Mike Robinson, CEO of Bill Reid Trust and president of Bill Reid Foundation, is a columnist for Troy Media.
