We think we know our oceanfront.

We sunbathe at English Bay, jog the Stanley Park seawall and drive high above Howe Sound, casting affectionate glances at one of the most scenic landscapes in Canada.

The truth is, beyond such fleeting moments, we don’t know our oceanfront very well at all. Most of it is obscured by forests, rock bluffs, buildings, no trespassing signs and a general lack of road access that keeps curious eyes at bay.

I have a simple solution to that problem — my old, scratched-up Prijon plastic kayak that I’ve used for years for ocean kayaking on the remote B.C. coast as well as running white-water rivers in the province’s Interior wilderness.

What better way to nose up to homes suddenly naked to the world or skimming across shallow waters that would deter larger, motor-driven vessels.

Larry Pynn kayaked Metro Vancouver’s coastline to study the terrain from the oceanfront.

Metro Vancouver is home to the most expensive oceanfront real estate in Canada as well as our nation’s largest port, handling some $200 billion worth of goods traded annually with 170 countries.

Not everything has an absolute price tag. The Fraser River delta is globally significant for its importance to birds. A recovering population of marine mammals includes transient killer whales that regularly appear within the port’s inner harbour. And the importance of finite public access will only grow as the region’s population expands by one million by 2040.

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There is something special about the waterfront. The bracing sea breeze, the mystery of life beneath the surface, and the knowledge that this vast fluid highway — with all its beauty and dangers — connects us with the planet.

Today, I begin a solo, 10-day journey along Metro Vancouver’s oceanfront from West Vancouver in Howe Sound south to White Rock on the Canada-U.S. border.

With the exception of Vancouver’s inner harbour, which is off limits to human-powered craft, I am free to paddle where I like, document the nature and changing scenery, and chat with the people who live, work and play on the waterfront.

I have packed a small tent for urban guerrilla camping, but have no specific plans or expectations of the daily challenges and experiences that lie ahead.

What I do know is that my understanding and appreciation of Metro Vancouver will never be the same and that the path to adventure and exploration can be as close as your own backyard.

lpynn@vancouversun.com

8-part series info: 

May 7 — West Vancouver: A close-up and personal view of some of Canada’s most expensive and scenic real estate.

May 9 — Inner Harbour: Exploring how nature continues to survive in Canada’s busiest port.

May 10 — Eastern Burrard Inlet: Heavy industry and residential neighbourhoods seek ways to coexist.

May 11 — Vancouver waterfront: Fresh insights into the familiar postcard face of our city.

May 12 — The Fraser Delta: Mankind’s historic footprint on the rich ecology of marsh and mud.

May 13 — Roberts Bank: Port of Vancouver expansion plans raise concerns for fish and birds.

May 14  — Point Roberts and Boundary Bay: A paddle through international waters exposes more than cheap gas and milk.

May 16 —  Crescent Beach and White Rock: Toxic rail traffic leaves lingering concern on scenic oceanfront.

One does not embark on a 10-day paddling trip without considering those who went before.

First Nations plied these waters for millennia in dugout cedar canoes described by the Bill Reid Centre at Simon Fraser University as the “single most important physical manifestation of Northwest Coast culture” existing at the “nexus between technology and living beings.”

Then came the Spanish and British in their sailing ships in the later 1700s, charting the coast and putting thoughts to paper.

Captain George Vancouver, navigating Howe Sound on June 14, 1792, wrote of the “dark gloomy weather that added greatly to the dreary prospect of the surrounding country,” described the Coast Mountains as a “stupendous snowy barrier … rising from the sea abruptly to the clouds” and spoke of the melting snow sending sublime torrents of water down rocky chasms.

The early afternoon sun shatters across the surface of Howe Sound and an El Niño pushes the temperature to a balmy 13 C in February. There’s barely a ripple on the water, which is a good thing. The powerful Squamish winds that barrel down the sound can be lethal, including the deaths of two experienced male paddlers who died in 2007 when their kayak flipped.

Captain Vancouver recorded a vacant landscape when he travelled here: “Not a bird, nor living creature was to be seen, and the roaring of the falling cataracts in every direction precluded their being heard, had any been in our neighbourhood.”

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He could not have known that June is the quietest month for birds in our region, whereas in winter the number and diversity are greater than anywhere in Canada. Nature is all around me: the dark slippery periscope of a harbour seal; the squeaky-door call of a bald eagle; Canada geese honking from an old barge; goldeneye ducks and common and hooded mergansers carving delicate wakes just offshore.

Paddlers in Howe Sound must be wary of the wake created by BC ferries, including the Queen of Surrey departing Horseshoe Bay for Langdale on the Sunshine Coast. 

Below the bustling Sea to Sky Highway, the rocky shoreline is indented with small sea caves. Frail waterfalls tumble toward the Pacific Ocean. And massive log stumps stranded 10 metres up the rocks speak of powerful winter storms.

Paddling close to shore also has its hazards. Ferry waves arrive unexpectedly and, combined with backwash off the rocks, are enough to capsize an unsuspecting paddler. West Vancouver provides much to distract.

It is Metro Vancouver’s quintessential residential community. Homes rising from shoreline up Hollyburn Mountain represented $52 million in tax revenues in 2014 compared with just $36,000 for industry.

West Van is home to three of the top 10 most expensive homes on the Metro Vancouver oceanfront and detached homes on the ocean have an average value of $6.3 million, according to BC Assessment data provided to The Sun by Landcor Data Corp.

Architecturally distinct waterfront homes loom above the shoreline, badgered into the forest of Douglas fir and cedar. 

Staircases leading to the water are forged from wood, concrete, rock, metal, aluminum, some spiralled, others with glass siding. Some lead to sun decks and chairs or benches. One sign warns of a sewage outfall, another to beware of mermaids.

Just ahead the scenic seaside community of Horseshoe Bay looms as a navigational challenge.

BC Ferries vessels may seem slow from the perspective of a cheeseburger lunch in the cafeteria, but at kayak level they move along at intimidating speeds exceeding 20 knots.

Once the 140-metre-long Queen of Surrey — almost five times the size of Vancouver’s ship, Discovery — is berthed and loading cars, I boot it across the bay and take refuge behind rocks at Tyee Point.

New explorers

Other modern-day explorers precede me. Two 21-year-olds from North Vancouver — Ethan Kennedy and Tyler Salt, graduates of Carson Graham Secondary school — are also checking out a beach property and wondering why the home is all boarded up and splashed with graffiti.

Property records show the 4.5-hectare Nelson Avenue property is assessed at more than $17 million and is owned by PAK Construction Ltd., the directors of which are Efat and Kazem Askari of West Vancouver.

While contemplating universities and careers, Kennedy and Salt enjoy exploring remote and little-known pockets of land from the North Shore to Squamish. They’d seen this place while riding BC Ferries and decided to have a look.

“We saw you and wondered who you were,” Salt says. 

“If we’re not supposed to be here then he’s not supposed to be here,” adds Kennedy: “We’ll go down together.”

Ethan Kennedy and Tyler Salt of North Vancouver explore Tyee Point at Horseshoe Bay. 

 

I paddle southward along the shoreline and find a burly man looking down from a residential construction site. He walks down to the water to chat, pointing out the impressive garden of green sea urchins below my kayak.

Home builder Mike Ruegamer of North Vancouver tells me I am lucky because I get paid to paddle and because the seas are frequently stormy here.

This is the 102nd home he has constructed in the Vancouver area and the one he won’t easily forget.

“We’ve been here for over five years,” he says of the 10,000-square-foot concrete home on Arbutus Place. “It’s like having an office job, going to the same place every day.”

Mike Ruegamer spent five years building a 10,000-square-foot oceanfront home on Arbutus Place in West Vancouver. 

The owner is a German businessman married to a woman from Saskatchewan and they’re finally about to move in. At what cost?

Ruegamer replies it’s the kind of money you’d expect from winning a lottery. “It’s incredibly detailed, the amount of work and planning that goes into it. All my homes typically take two years minimum, but they are built to last.”

Just beyond lies the rocky bluffs of Whytecliff Park — Canada’s first marine-protected area, created in 1993. People are positioned across the rocks like Hollywood Squares: families, lovers, friends, all seeking nature’s solace in a region of 2.5 million.

The constant beauty of Whytecliff Park stands out among the residential upheaval along the oceanfront of West Vancouver. 

A spine of rocks exposed at low tide extends out to Whyte Islet, where God knows how many people must get stuck when the tide comes in.

Batchelor Bay around the corner is followed by salmon-bearing Larson Creek, named after Pete Larson, owner of the old Canyon View Hotel above the Cleveland Dam in North Vancouver.

Old versus new

I erect my tent in the late afternoon on a patch of grass near the Gleneagles Golf Course and practice no-trace camping — creating a small campfire below the tide line and even cleaning up others’ garbage. Still, it is a restless night, wondering if the police might show to roust me.

The next morning, raindrops bounce off the griddle of flat ocean. It makes for tranquil paddling despite the insidious water finding its way down the cuffs of my jacket.

I cast a glance over my left shoulder toward West Vancouver Yacht Club and Thunderbird Marina then skirt the shoreline of Eagle Island, accessible only by boat.

Indian Bluff just ahead is an impressive stretch of rock that precedes the boundary of 65-hectare Lighthouse Park. I paddle past Juniper Point and Merganser Bay to Point Atkinson and its distant views of Point Grey in Vancouver.

My map warns of potential “strong tide rips and steep overfalls” where the waters of Burrard Inlet and Howe Sound meet. Calm conditions allow for an up-close look at the historic white-and-red lighthouse, which was built in 1912, declared a national historic site in 1994 and automated in 1996. Elaine Graham, widow of the last lightkeeper, Donald, still lives on the site, but refuses to be interviewed.

Around the corner I pull up to a pocket beach where longtime residents of West Vancouver are playing with their dogs.

“There’s been lots of development,” begins Marina Alexander, raised at 29th Street and Palmerston Avenue. “We had chickens. It was very rural. Now the homes are huge.”

Some are cashing in on the high prices and moving out, but not her. This is her community, where her friends live. “Every once in a while … you look at how spectacular it is and you think, ‘why wouldn’t the world want to live here?’ ”

Tom Foster, a resident of 40 years, agrees that the village feel of West Vancouver is gone. “It was very peaceful. That ambience has changed. People recognized that West Van was a very nice place to live, so they started to come and build, tear down and build.”

One constant is Lighthouse Park, the sort of waterfront green space that only grows in value over time.

“It hasn’t changed,” Foster says. “It’s still as great as ever, a wonderful place to come and relax and see nature.”

Seals, sea lions, mink and river otters can be spotted here. “It’s pretty spectacular in the middle of a big city.”

The park gives way to the residential Caulfeild area and a new-look waterfront — homes no longer situated on imposing rock bluffs in the natural forest but on flatter ground and decorated with palms, trimmed hedges and ornamentals.

At low tide, mussels and other crustaceans are fair game. Gulls paddle up to the exposed rocks to peck away while crows stand on top and work their way down. One gull catches a small purple starfish but is frustrated by the fact it hardens out of the water. As part of his master’s thesis at Simon Fraser University, Justin Suraci found it can take 45 minutes to choke one down, including a “pre-digesting” period to soften it up. “I often saw gulls hold two legs in their mouth/throat for several minutes, then … switch it around to hold two different legs in their mouth.”

As I continue eastward, one man waves as he powerwashes his backyard, as does the operator of a backhoe. A worker shouts “ahoy” from the third-floor window of a home under construction.

Up on Radcliffe Avenue is the lavish home of business magnate Frank Giustra: eight bedrooms, six full and four partial bathrooms on three lots with a total assessed value of $37 million. We both attended Aldergrove Secondary school and our late principal Norm Sherritt at reunions liked to tell the story of having to call Giustra’s Italian mother due to his rebellious nature.

“Go ahead, she doesn’t speak English,” Giustra taunted. Sherritt reported back that “she speaks better English than you do.”

The West Vancouver home of business magnate Frank Giustra. 

Just ahead, Dundarave Park is the perfect place to come ashore for a hot lunch near a colourful drugstore mural that depicts the first European sailing ships and wisps of smoke from native villages on a forested shoreline.

Single-family residences yield to highrises on the oceanfront east of Dundarave, the maximum allowable height set at 20 storeys. 

Dundarave Park in West Vancouver.

At popular Ambleside Park, a welcome figure — a large cedar carving by artist Stan Joseph, with the assistance of Wes Nahanee — looks to the sea with open arms just before the Capilano River and the historic Squamish community of Xwemelch’stn.

The Welcome Figure, carved in 2001 from an old-growth cedar by Stan Joseph with the assistance of Wes Nahanee, faces boaters in Ambleside Park in West Vancouver, just west of the Capilano River. 

The first people

Captain Vancouver wrote fondly of his experience at First Narrows, where Lions Gate Bridge was later built in 1938. “Here we were met by about fifty Indians, in their canoes, who conducted themselves with the greatest decorum and civility, presenting us with several fish cooked … These good people, finding we were included to make some return for their hospitality, shewed much understanding in preferring iron to copper.”

Today, the Squamish remain sharp business people with vast land holdings that include the Park Royal Shopping Centre, Lynnwood and Mosquito Creek marinas, and the Capilano River RV Park — visible to motorists as they merge onto the north side of the Lions Gate Bridge.

I recall actor Matthew McConaughey on a late-night talk show relating how he stayed in the RV park while shooting a movie in Vancouver. Salmon were running upstream, he said, and natives would place metal shopping carts on their side in the water, let them fill with fish, then cart away the bounty.

Unable to find a good take-out point on the Capilano River, I put the kayak onto my pickup truck and check in as the park’s only tenter. My address tonight is 295 Tomahawk Avenue. Clean washrooms, hot showers, laundry, Wi-Fi, but no wood campfires and, sorry, the hot tub isn’t working.

You’d think that sleeping like a troll beneath a major bridge would be oppressively loud, but the slow-merging traffic is surprisingly quiet.

Across from me, Derek Garner is couch surfing in a relative’s RV after a couple of weeks on the streets. The father of two misses his family and struggles to get ahead without a job and a recent hospitalization.

“Twenty-five cents for water at McDonald’s is a fair price — if you’ve got it,” he says. “I’ve been 14 months sober. I don’t do any drugs. Smoke a little bit.”

He would like a job that involves keeping kids safe. “Social work, teaching life skills, taking care of the kids and making sure they don’t hurt themselves with the shit that’s out there, needles and who knows what.”

 

Bob Brown and his dog George examine reporter Larry Pynn’s tent at the Capilano RV Park in North Vancouver.

When we look out at the craggy industrial face of the Port of Vancouver, we see freighters from around the world, piles of sulphur and coal, grain unloaded from rail cars into silos, commercial float planes, tugs, ferries and gantries moving container cargo.

Much less obvious is the natural world that defies the odds and makes its home within the bustling waters and unyielding infrastructure of the inner harbour.

At Harbour Green Park at Cordova and Bute, a half-circle of large orange buoys gives no indication of the protected forests of bull kelp and fish flourishing beneath the surface.

Next door, Vancouver Convention Centre delegates are oblivious to the range of conservation measures built in to the facility. Crew substituted clean soils for sediments polluted with old industrial hydrocarbons, constructed reef, shoal and islet habitat, and installed pipes for rockfish, and heavy chains for invertebrates. Some 100 marine species are thought to frequent the site, about one-third more than before construction of the facility in 2009. 

“It’s pretty unique, compared to other harbours in the world,” Carrie Brown, the port’s environmental director, says of the wildlife. “We have something very special here.”

Vancouver’s inner harbour is a commercial and industrial hub, but is also important to marine life.  

Society tends to focus on the value of residential properties on the waterfront, but the inner harbour is where you find the big numbers. According to BC Assessment figures compiled by Landcor Data Corp, the Vancouver Convention Centre tops the scale at $658 million, followed by Canada Place at $117 million and Vancouver Shipyards at $79 million.

The port’s value to the natural world — invertebrates, fish, birds, even visiting killer whales — is not as easy valued, and nor is critical habitat already lost to industry.

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A new report by engineering consultants Kerr Wood Leidal for the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation notes that about half of Burrard Inlet’s shoreline has been altered, 53 kilometres of natural shoreline lost, and 93 per cent of the inlet’s estuaries gobbled up by development.

There is no quick fix for reversing more than a century of industrial degradation in the inner harbour.

A closer look

Just getting out to see the issues is no easy task.

Rowing and paddling are prohibited from Lions Gate Bridge to Berry Point just east of Second Narrows Bridge, with an exception made for the Vancouver Rowing Club in Coal Harbour near Stanley Park.

So I leave my kayak on shore and join Rob Butler and Rod MacVicar of the Pacific Wildlife Foundation, along with Brown, aboard a seven-metre aluminum vessel for a close-up look at the tension between nature and industry.

Rob Butler of the Pacific Wildlife Foundation.

We have barely left dock at Harbour Green Park, proceeding into a brewing storm, when Butler raises a pair of binoculars toward two western grebes within a much larger flock of surf scoters.

“We used to see hundreds of them in the mid-90s,” reflects the former federal bird scientist. “People would hear them calling. Now there’s just a handful.”

The grebes have long, slender swanlike necks and one of the world’s most remarkable mating dances — pairs rising up in unison and paddling rapidly across the water surface. The species is provincially red-listed, at risk, in part, due to human disturbance on its inland breeding grounds: Salmon Arm, north Okanagan Lake and Duck Lake near Creston. While wintering in areas such as Vancouver harbour, it is also vulnerable to pollution and a lack of forage fish such as sand lance and herring.

Burrard Inlet and English Bay officially comprise an Important Bird Area, a unique declaration in Canada for the inner harbour of a major port. While the designation has no teeth, it does highlight the port’s global significance for the grebe, Barrow’s goldeneye and surf scoter, and national significance for the great blue heron.

Thick-beaked surf scoters are common visitors to Port of Vancouver in winter. 

Butler was lead author on a report published in 2015 (based on monthly surveys 2011-13) on marine birds in Burrard Inlet, Indian Arm and English Bay. It showed that birds eating mussels such as the scoters are doing relatively well compared with fish eaters like the grebes. One-day numbers of greater scaup peaked at 1,627 and surf scoters at 7,557 in December/January, Barrows goldeneye at 2,133 in February, white-winged scoters at 2,502 and bufflehead at 252 in March, and glaucous-winged gulls at 4,114 in September.

Marbled murrelets are threatened seabirds seen only occasionally in Port of Vancouver. 

Herring are critical to the food chain but their eggs fail to develop on creosote wood pilings. In response, streamkeepers have successfully wrapped pilings with plastic netting in areas such as Squamish and False Creek to encourage spawning, but that is only a short-term solution. Creosote is a cheap wood preservative compared with concrete or steel.

In Washington state, the Department of Fish and Wildlife prohibits creosote pilings in marinas and terminals in saltwater as well as in any hydraulic project in freshwater. 

The port has the power to implement restrictions on creosote even in the absence of federal regulations and is reviewing the environmental implications along with potential alternatives and costs.

“It has to be science-based,” Brown says of any restriction. “If federal fisheries has no law against it, we have to do the research ourselves.” 

Expansion plans

We proceed eastward to Crab Park at Portside — a refuge of green on the Downside Eastside waterfront where community concerns focus on shipping giant DP World’s planned $320-million container expansion at Centerm next door. 

The port owns the industrial land, is officially proposing the expansion, and is conducting its own environmental assessment — the sort of cosy system that port opponents around the region decry as a conflict of interest that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau must address. 

Roger Emsley has worked on port-related community committees in Delta for the past decade and laments: “During that time, I have watched as the port has become more and more arrogant, less prepared to listen to community concerns, less interested in listening to alternative viewpoints on environmental matters and on a number of key issues simply refusing to address matters that are raised in and by communities that host port operations.”

In total, the port manages 16,000 hectares of water and 1,000 hectares of land.

Any expansion to Centerm would require habitat compensation, although details won’t be available until late summer.

Does industry push back in such cases? 

“In the early years there was resistance,” Brown responds. “But I’m seeing an increased awareness and I like to think people want to do the right thing. It’s part of doing business.”

Experience shows that even the best human intensions can be a poor substitute for natural habitat.

Bird life

East of Centerm stands an artificial nest platform constructed by the cement giant, Lafarge, in 2009 to benefit a pair of bald eagles nesting in a lone spindly cottonwood tree on the property.

A pair of bald eagles didn’t take to an artificial nest constructed by cement giant Lafarge.

When the cottonwood finally blew over in 2014, the eagles moved to a nest site in a fir tree in an east-side residential neighbourhood rather than take to the artificial platform.

Butler remains ever vigilant for wing beats off our vessel’s stern section. “See those scoters, all along there? Maybe 1,000 or so. They swallow the mussels then take them offshore to digest them.”

Barrows goldeneye ducks are a common visitor to Vancouver’s inner harbour area in winter. 

Our journey continues to New Brighton Park, where restoration plans are afoot for construction of a foreshore saltwater marsh for fish and birds, subtidal rocky reefs, trails and “daylighting” of Renfrew Creek.

Next door is Viterra Cascadia Terminal, where peregrine falcons feed on pigeons attracted to the grain silos; they are part of an urban success story for the raptors across North America.

MacVicar, a former high school teacher at the forefront of marine education projects, delicately guides the vessel on a flood tide against a strong easterly wind. Several pelagic cormorants resting on the bottom of the Second Narrows Bridge foundations hint at a greater story.

Butler looks skyward and reveals: “They nest in the girders under the bridge. Probably 100 to 200. They’re safe from eagles.”

Bufflehead ducks are part of the natural wonder found within Port of Vancouver. 

In the past, another 90 pairs of double-crested cormorants have been observed nesting on a transmission tower at Second Narrows. And on the north side of the inner harbour, up to an estimated 10 pairs of pigeon guillemots nest under the pier at Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver.

It’s further evidence of the resilience of nature in an unnatural world.

Pollution 

That makes the refinery the third-largest air polluter in Metro Vancouver after two cement plants: Lafarge, in Richmond, at 1,975 tonnes, and Lehigh, in Delta, at 2,280 tonnes.

The bigger concern for marine life is the threat of a major oil spill, including from a seven-fold increase to 34 tankers per month associated with Kinder Morgan’s proposed $6.8-billion twinning of its pipeline to Westridge Terminal in Burnaby. 

No one wishes for an environmental calamity, but some good can come from it.

In 2007, a Kinder Morgan pipeline ruptured in Burnaby, spewing 234,000 litres of oil into a Burnaby neighbourhood and ultimately Burrard Inlet. More than 220,000 litres of oil escaped and 70,000 litres reached Burrard Inlet.

A provincial court judge in 2011 ordered Kinder Morgan, B. Cusano Contracting Inc., and R.F. Binnie and Associates Ltd. to each pay $149,000 to the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation to help fund habitat-restoration projects in Burrard Inlet.

Several estuaries in Burrard Inlet benefited from the money, including Seymour River, Mosquito Creek, Lynn Creek and Mackay Creek. Work has included reshaping the estuaries, removing invasive plants, bringing in logs for habitat complexity, replanting native vegetation with fencing to keep out Canada geese, and erecting piles of rocks for snakes and bird nests.

Restoration work at Mackay Creek estuary in North Vancouver is designed to increase fish habitat and help marine life in industrial Burrard Inlet. 

Butler has witnessed the return of several species over the decades such as the bald eagle, trumpeter swan and peregrine falcon — once humanity stopped shooting them or poisoning them with DDT. 

He is confident Burrard Inlet can come back, too. Creating critical habitat for forage fish such as herring and sand lance and providing a pathway for them to hide from predators is a great start. 

“We know what has to be done; it’s just a matter of working away at it,” Butler concludes.

lpynn@postmedia.com

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For 15 minutes I pinball around the offices of the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation — “People of the Inlet” — until a decision is made allowing me to launch my kayak from a small rocky beach next to the canoe shed on Dollarton Highway in North Vancouver.

The band’s director of administration, Dale Komanchuk, even writes a note of authorization on the back of his business card in case anyone challenges me, and allows me to park my pickup truck overnight behind the community centre.

Canadian flag draped across a log at a small beach at the Tsleil-Waututh Nation in North Vancouver.

Passing the reserve, I spot a small pebble beach with a Canadian flag draped over a stump. One ramshackle abandoned house has no fewer than four derelict boats outside — a far cry from the imposing mansions of the West Vancouver waterfront.  That’s not the only change: kelp has replaced mussels on the rocks, and I spot my first great blue herons — all evidence of a different marine ecology at work in these protected waters.

Early explorers

When Captain George Vancouver plied these waters in 1792, natives in canoes accompanied him up the inlet, where he spent the night near the entrance to Indian Arm.

The crew tried seine fishing without success and allowed one native to fire a musket “with much fear and trembling.” The natives were fascinated by the sailors’ white skin and “gave us reason to conclude that we were the first people from a civilized country they had seen,” Vancouver wrote in his journals. He named the inlet after Sir Harry Burrard, a Royal Navy officer.

Some stretches of Burrard Inlet have changed relatively little since Vancouver’s visit, especially Indian Arm, protected on both sides by 6,689-hectare Indian Arm (Say Nuth Khaw Yum) Provincial Park. 

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Residential homes overlooking a sulphur pile in eastern Burrard Inlet.

In contrast, the portion between Port Moody and Second Narrows has undergone a major transformation. Today, it is defined as the Metro Vancouver ocean frontage where residential neighbourhoods coexist with heavy industry, including oil tankers capable of causing a human and environmental catastrophe. It is also home to some of the region’s most popular, and vulnerable, green spaces. More than four-fifths of the oceanfront in Port Moody alone is parkland — the highest percentage in Metro Vancouver.

The Tsleil-Waututh have been here for thousands of years and feel they have more to lose than anyone due to their continuing connection to the land and its wildlife. Their main reserve is within sight of both the Chevron Canada refinery and Kinder Morgan’s Westridge terminal.

“The relationship is tenuous,” allows Carleen Thomas, the band’s intergovernmental relations manager. “We understand what industry provides to the Canadian economy and society. But the Tsleil-Waututh have always protected our homeland and waters.”

Herring stocks — food for humans, birds, other fish and marine mammals — are also showing tentative signs of recovery.

“Just in the last few years we’re seeing herring return,” confirms John Konovsky, the band’s natural resources planner, citing several habitat restoration initiatives for estuaries in Burrard Inlet. “That will be a watershed event. You can’t have a healthy inlet without herring.”

Up ahead, I paddle toward a 75-metre barge, Burrard Cleaner #18, anchored just offshore and operated by the industry-funded Western Canada Marine Response Corporation. It offers accommodation, an office and pumping capabilities and sits alongside the Burrard Cleaner #5, a 7.5-metre crew boat.

I shout: “Hello, anyone home?” Eventually, a maintenance worker hangs his head off the side to tell me that he can’t talk and that I should contact media relations for a tour on another day. Even out here, the flaks rule.

Going crabbing 

At Cates Park pier, eight men and women are busy tossing out crab traps and sifting through their catch for legal-sized catches.

A ninth man, Antonio Lopez, stands to the side and watches because he has no federal fishing permit. He tells me he is a painter who just finished a job nearby and accompanied a friend to the oceanfront for the afternoon. Lopez came to Canada from Chile 14 years ago, settling in Montreal then moving to B.C. one-a-half years ago, and lives in East Vancouver.

Antonio Lopez, originally from Chile, watches recreational crabbers at Cates Park in North Vancouver. 

“All the people said it is so expensive (here) and raining all the time,” he said. “But I wanted to see for myself. I like Vancouver; the weather is so good, especially last winter. I don’t miss the snow and minus temperatures.”

The properties along Dollarton Highway feature relatively modest homes on expensive lots, with the prices ramping up several-fold as I round the corner of Cates Park along Beachview Drive. At Deep Cove, I pull ashore for a bathroom break and cashew-celery soup lunch, and stock up with food for dinner and breakfast. I am the only kayak on the water this afternoon, but the cove is home to a popular kayak and stand-up paddleboard rental operation in summer.

Belcarra

Twenty minutes later, I am scooting directly eastward across open water to Belcarra, a community of about 700 tucked away near the end of the road close to Sasamat Lake. A sudden brisk wind foretells a squall in the distance toward Second Narrows.

A bridge leads to private Hamber Island, once owned by the B.C. lieutenant-governor Eric Hamber.

Plans for an architecturally designed home on the 1.2-hectare island never materialized and the bridge looms as an eyesore on the oceanfront plastered with no trespassing signs.

Far more pleasing to the eye are seven cabins from around the 1940s — remnants of the area’s cottage past — peaking out from the forested shoreline in Belcarra Regional Park. Metro Vancouver leases the cabins for less than $600 per month per cabin but has indicated it wants them gone. Port Moody council has granted the cottages, expropriated in 1971, heritage status, though it carries no legal weight.

Jo Ledingham has lived here since 1964 and says the rents don’t include extra costs of insurance and maintenance.

“It’s hard,” she says. “You need a new roof or hot water tank and you don’t know where you’re at. But we’re still here. It’s the price of living in paradise.”

A short distance away, a father and daughter are angling off the rocks.

“Catch anything?” I ask. “Rocks,” he says. “But it’s beautiful.”

The bottom limbs on the shoreline trees are trimmed as neatly as hedges, reflecting the tide line.

Around the corner, I pull onto an exquisite pocket beach and make camp on a bordering trail near sunset. Crystal-clear waters caress the fine pebbles draped in cedar boughs. There is even a bear-proof garbage can and an outhouse stocked with toilet paper. 

This is Maple Beach, about a half-hour hike from the Belcarra Bay picnic area. It is part of 76 hectares of federal lands managed by Parks Canada, though not a national park, and including Admiralty Point and Burns Point.

I share the beach with two couples: one, from Port Moody; the other, friends visiting from Ontario. Riki-Kay Middleton and Chris Anthon are tattoo artists from Guelph and they agree to be photographed holding hands, she winning the battle to be on top.

Tattoo artists Riki-Kay Middleton and Chris Anthon hold hands at Maple Beach, a stretch of federal land within Belcarra Regional Park.

Minutes later, the four are headed back and I have the place all to myself, wondering exactly where some of Captain Vancouver’s men decided to spend the night on shore during their visit to this area.

“Some of the young gentlemen, however, preferring the stony beach for their couch, without duly considering the line of high water mark, found themselves incommoded by the flood tide, of which they were not apprized until they were nearly afloat …” he wrote in his journals. 

I hear the din of traffic on the Barnet Highway motoring between Burnaby and Port Moody. Flaring from the Chevron refinery is reminiscent of the Olympic flame on the downtown Vancouver waterfront. I enjoy a glass of wine and start my own small campfire below the tide line to ensure the rising ocean erases all physical traces of my visit.

The full moon is so bright that from inside my tent I can make out the silhouettes of sword ferns alongside the trail.

One train after another whistling from across the inlet makes for a restless night. It’s cold, too. I awaken to the sound of an early morning visitor to the park walking past my tent and find ice caked onto the kayak hull. A kingfisher catches a small fish and retreats to the top of a piling to swallow it while a gentle mist hovers above the ocean surface.

After a cup of drip coffee, I continue eastward along the northern shoreline to BC Hydro’s hulking gas-fired Burrard thermal plant, a political footfall that no longer produces electricity but serves a support role for electricity for the greater grid system. Signs warn of underwater and electrical hazards.

Industrial reality

Two dozen Barrow’s goldeneye ducks and a harbour seal patrol just off the facility. Next door, a pair of Canada geese take up residence on the booms outside the Imperial Oil townsite — the Ioco refinery heritage property that shut down in 1995 and is, in part, scheduled to be redeveloped as a residential village. 

Up ahead, in the residential neighbourhood of Pleasantside, I stop to chat with George Otto working in his backyard. The former owner of the Barnet Motor Inn has lived here for 20 years and accepts industry and its historical presence in the inlet.

“I don’t have a problem with it,” he says. “It was here when we arrived. It’s kind of interesting to watch all the activities, the boats coming in. We go swimming here all the time, do a bit of crabbing. It’s nice having the outdoors right in your backyard.”

George Otto, former owner of Barnet Motor Inn, has lived 20 years in the Pleasantside area of Ioco. 

Just around the corner, below Alderside Road, I find Scott Stubbs of Kerr Wood Leidal, an engineering consultant firm, at the water’s edge doing infrastructure location and assessment work for the City of Port Moody.

“This is a 450-millimetre diameter concrete pipe, gathering up water from the roads, creeks and drainage basins,” he explains. 

Scott Stubbs works for an engineering consulting firm hired by Port Moody to locate and assess pipes leading into Burrard Inlet. 

From here, it’s a short paddle to end of the inlet in Port Moody. Highrises pop up in the background behind 40-hectare Shoreline Park, frontal tidal mudflats and with a waterfront trail extending three kilometres through forestlands and across two salmon-bearing streams. A public wharf off Rocky Point Park downtown seems a natural spot to go out for fish and chips.

Rick Nott, a concrete company retiree from Maple Ridge, is in the parking lot polishing up his 1975 Dodge Dart Swinger. He could do that anywhere but chooses here, on the waterfront. “It’s like brand new, inside and out. I get lots of compliments. ”

Nott use to take his kids swimming here, back in the ’60s. “There’s been a lot of changes. There used to be nothing and now all the highrises. It doesn’t have the small-town feel anymore.”

Rick Nott polishes us his 1975 Dodge Dart Swinger in the parking lot at Rocky Point Park in Port Moody. 

As I head westward along the south side of the inlet, I observe piles of sulphur — a byproduct of refining of natural gas — at Pacific Coast Terminals. The bulk-loading facility also handles canola and ethylene glycol, and is in the midst of a $200-million-plus expansion to handle potash starting in late 2016.

I paddle alongside the hull of the 145-metre chemical tanker Lime Galaxy and shout up at a foreign worker on the deck. He looks all around before peering straight down — his last thought — and waves at me with a smile.

Ships to the facility require a B.C. pilot and tug escort. Even canola — an edible product — can be a trouble in marine waters. There have been repeated canola spills over the years that have killed birds and caused environmental harm in the harbour. Vancouver-based West Coast Reduction Ltd. paid $20,000 to Environment Canada for wildlife protection as a result of a 1998 spill.

Park-like atmosphere

It is preceded by some rude belching on an industrial scale. The source is a female Steller sea lion in a caged pool on the end of a dock.

She is one of four sea lions that are part of a research program funded by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and involving the University of B.C. and Vancouver Aquarium aimed at finding potential causes behind a decline in the species in remote western Alaska.

The four are routinely taken out into the inlet to perform experiments that measure expenditure of energy during foraging.

I take a few photos and soon biological technician Rob Marshall walks out of an office to chat.

“That’s Hazy, and she has only one eye,” he says. “She is one of our most vocal animals.”

Rob Marshall, biological technician from UBC at a sea lion research facility in Burrard Inlet.

Several wild male California sea lions cruised by recently for a visit and, who knows, to size up the goods.

Marshall grew up in Port Moody at a time when the city did not enjoy today’s desirable reputation. He realizes the city was founded on industry, but argues that the value of the oceanfront to the public and environment cannot be underestimated.

Burrard Thermal’s closing, the Ioco development, and conversion of Flavelle sawmill to a mixed urban development next to Rocky Point Park all makes for big changes for the area.

“Come back in 10 years and you’ll hardly recognize the place,” he says.

lpynn@postmedia.com

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It is a calm sunny morning at Third Beach in Stanley Park and not even an introduced eastern grey squirrel is bouncing around for free peanuts.

About the only thing stirring in the corner parking lot is me, hauling my kayak off the back of my pickup truck and dragging it across the grass down a small bluff to the seawall to be hoisted onto the salty shores of English Bay.

Third Beach is the closest practical put-in for the continuation of my journey from Lions Gate Bridge, just a few paddle strokes south of Siwash Rock. Those few people out for an early walk are quick to take notice, ask what I’m doing and tell me their own stories.

Vancouver snowbirds typically fly south for the winter, but not John Brown of New Brunswick. The retired engineer from the Point Lepreau nuclear plant regularly comes to Vancouver from February to April to stay with a brother in the West End.

“Great months to be out here,” he insists, his shorts offset by a toque. “The flowers are coming out, and there’s such variation in the shrubs and trees.”

John Brown, a seasonal visitor from New Brunswick, poses at Third Beach in Stanley Park.

He walks almost 10 kilometres per day and once spotted killer whales off Stanley Park along with a crowd of gawkers that included a helicopter circling overhead. 

Almost half of Metro Vancouver’s oceanfront land from Lions Bay to White Rock is park or green space, according to a review of BC Assessment information by Landcor Data Corp. It defines who we are as a region, more than cappuccino bars and craft beer, historic buildings and highrises.

The moment I paddle out into the bay I abandon the predictability of solid ground for the vagaries of wind, currents, tides, cold water and obstacles such as submerged rocks near shore.

Being on the water also changes your perspective, forces you to look at the familiar through a new lens.

On the North Shore, homes creep like mange up the mountainsides, covering ever more of the forest that forms Vancouver’s natural backdrop. In West Vancouver, the maximum level for housing on Hollyburn Mountain is 365 metres, similar in North Vancouver district.

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Shipping risks

On the other hand, the freighters anchored in English Bay seem an integral part of the skyline, scenic in their own right and a symbol of the city’s role as a working port. Thirteen of a maximum allowable 18 anchorages are occupied this day in English Bay.

Some ships wait their turn to load cargo, others for parts and repairs, for crew changes, or even tidal conditions to proceed up Burrard Inlet. Oil tankers generally load quickly, while grain ships can wait up to 10 days or longer if they are loading various grades at multiple terminals.

Shipping also poses the harbour’s greatest risks.

As recently as April 2015, the grain carrier Marathassa spilled an estimated 2,800 litres of fuel into English Bay, of which the Western Canada Marine Response Corporation recovered an estimated 1,400 litres. A federal report on the event noted that the coast guard received about 600 pollution reports for the B.C. coast annually, about 40 of which occur in the port, and approximately 10 of which require an on-water recovery.

The Canadian Coast Guard says it has implemented several measures as a result of the incident, including improved notifications and better staff training, and is working on a regional response plan with other agencies and levels of government. 

I continue paddling along the shoreline of Stanley Park, smiling at the people who frame me into the foreground of their photographs of the bay.

Lou Parsons is a member of Jericho Rescue who routinely paddles his row boat in English Bay.

Off Second Beach, Lou Parsons is bobbing in his 4.2-metre fibreglass boat. The locksmith and member of Jericho Rescue Team used to work the tugs and regularly rows for the unique joys that cannot be experienced on land.

“It’s an environment that changes continually,” he explains. “When you’re on the water you’re exposed to a completely different set of experiences.”

They aren’t always good ones. 

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Rocky waters

In 1888, the former Hudson’s Bay Company wooden paddle-steamer, the Beaver, fell victim to strong winds and tides and fetched up on the rocks not far away at Prospect Point and sank in First Narrows.

Parsons keeps incidents like that in mind when he rows but can still be fooled by conditions. Once he left Jericho and found himself carried out into the Strait of Georgia by an easterly wind.

“What was a 25-minute trip going out was three hours coming back.”

Jericho Rescue Team is a volunteer group that makes 250-300 rescues per year, he says, the vast majority minor incidents such as righting small laser sailboats that capsize. Parsons is highly supportive of the federal Liberal government’s plan to reopen later this year the Canadian Coast Guard station in Kitsilano, closed by the Conservatives in 2013 despite massive public outcry.

“Bring it back,” Parsons implores. “They are great to work with and are equipped for a vastly different set of tasks than we are.”

As I approach English Bay Beach, one sign stands out among the highrises of the downtown landscape — the white-on-blue of the Cactus Club restaurant that opened on the oceanfront in 2012. While I am in favour of more restaurants on the waterfront, it’s unfortunate this one has become a jarring billboard.

An artist’s inukshuk erected at the corner of Bidwell Street and Beach Avenue reminds me of the real one I spotted years ago during a kayak trip off northern Baffin Island in the Arctic. These collections of rocks serve as landmarks, typically indicating good hunting and fishing locations, but in the urban wilderness could just as easily represent an individual’s personal, spiritual or emotional turning point.

A Syrian refugee family enjoys a visit to Sunset Beach in English Bay. (Fourth child not in picture).

Around the corner, I pull into sculpted Sunset Beach to chat with a family of six. Turns out they are Syrian refugees and speak no English. Well, almost.

We each take some photographs and the father says all their names into my tape recorder. Then he pushes the bow of my kayak to ease me on my journey and says, simply, “Welcome” — the one word he learned upon arrival at Vancouver International Airport.

False Creek

Ahead lies False Creek, the most congested and diverse stretch of oceanfront on my journey. I keep to the right shoreline while paddling under Burrard Bridge and past wharfs with pleasure craft and commercial fishing vessels, and on to Granville Island with its iconic market, shops and restaurants. I keep an air horn close by in case one of the innumerable pesky little passenger ferries gets too close.

My journey continues past several floating homes and colourful murals on six silos at Ocean Concrete painted by Brazilian twin brothers and street artists known as Os Gemeos using about 1,500 cans of spray paint in 2014.

Artwork on silos at the Ocean Concrete plant in False Creek.

The vibrant, multi-dimensional south shore of False Creek, with its sense of community, stands in sharp contrast to the creek’s antiseptic-looking north shore, dominated by high-end residential highrises.

Even here, though, the evolution is remarkable. Search the Internet for historic photos of False Creek and its beehive burners blasting out toxic smoke and you can still believe in a bright environmental future for our urban oceanfront.

Proceeding back out into English Bay, I am greeted by an armada of about 30 recreational vessels anchored just off the entrance to False Creek. They are saving about $12 per foot per month in moorage fees, although, in fact, local marinas can have a one- to two-year wait for a slip.

Life is a game for these mariners. In winter they are permitted to spend only three weeks at a time anchored in the sheltered waters of False Creek, after which they move to English Bay for about another three weeks, before moving back inside again. Starting in April, False Creek permits are valid for only 14 days.

Kristian Angelov anchors for free in English Bay near the entrance to False Creek. He is planning to sail to Los Angeles.

Kristian Angelov is a native Bulgarian testing out an emergency raft on the bow when I pull alongside his Coronado 10.5-metre sail boat, purchased last September in Washington state. He’s lived in Montreal, and has worked in the oilpatch in Alberta and the potash mines of Saskatchewan. His plan is to sail to Los Angeles in the spring.

“It’s like a boat apartment, kitchen and hot water,” he explains of life on the water.

My journey continues past Vanier Park and the Vancouver Maritime Museum, where the memory of pioneering mariners are preserved, and on past the Kitsilano shoreline. A man stands among the rocks and plays a flute, the melodic sound eddying around the shoreline.

Graffiti on a wall below a Kitsilano home facing English Bay. 

The line of affluent homes — Kitsilano’s so-called Golden Mile — is located on smaller lots than some of their peers in West Vancouver and they do not enjoy the same easy access to the shoreline. These property owners cannot even see the graffiti on the retaining walls below them, including Lululemon founder Chip Wilson’s home on Point Grey Road with an assessed value of $63.8 million — the most expensive in B.C.

I take pleasure threading my way beneath the wharf pilings of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club despite signs telling me not to, then pass Jericho Beach Park and Spanish Banks en route to Point Grey and the University Endowment Lands. 

Retiree Jack English is a regular walker at Wreck Beach.

Suddenly, urban life disappears and I am paddling almost alone past Acadia Beach next to a rocky shoreline beneath leafy cliffs fronting the rolling waters of the Strait of Georgia — one of the most beautiful stretches of the trip.

There’s history here, too: a couple of Second World War light towers, part of military infrastructure that includes gun emplacements still found near the Museum of Anthropology designed to protect Vancouver from naval attack, at Tower Beach.

Farther along, Wreck Beach is a patch of sandy beach at the foot of stairs at Trail 6 in UBC. It’s known for nude sunbathers in summer, but there’s not so much as a plunging neckline to be found on this cool evening.

Campfires are banned here, within 874-hectare Pacific Spirit Park, but several are burning as I pull ashore on the soft sands. I hide my tent behind some shrubs on the calm side of a rock breakwater next to a marsh and log booms demarking the north arm of the Fraser River.

The beach is busy with mostly young students who have ditched their homework and come down for the sunset views and to watch the harbour seals and tugs just offshore. Several individuals stay after dark to drink and party loudly for hours and are oblivious to my presence at the other end of the beach. They eventually stagger up the steps, their flashlights flickering through the forest like fire flies, leaving the stars overhead and the waves gently massaging the shoreline at my toes.

lpynn@postmedia.com

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BC Hydro has received a provincial enforcement order to immediately control run-off water and sediments from ongoing construction of its Site C dam project in the Peace River.

A compliance-and-enforcement document from the Environmental Assessment Office (EAO) shows that hydro violated its environmental certificate by failing to “control run-off water and sediment” at a ravine on the construction site in northeast B.C.

Hydro is ordered under Section 34.1 of the Environmental Assessment Act to act immediately to control existing and potential erosion and sediment run-off from slopes, piles, ditches, roads and bare soil.

The section allows the province to act when a project is not being “constructed, operated, modified, dismantled or abandoned” in accordance with an environmental assessment certificate, issued for Site C in October 2014.

Senior compliance officer Chris Park issued the order on April 7, following an inspection conducted between March 28 and April 1.

Excessive sediments entering water courses can pose a threat to aquatic life, including fish. 

Hydro spokesman Dave Conway said the corporation takes the inspection findings “very seriously and we’re working to rectify the situation.” Hydro has submitted a work plan to EAO. Hydro is implementing a project-wide plan to “address how erosion and sediment control will be managed on site,” he said. “We are committed to meeting all conditions of environmental certification.”

He added: “Ultimately, these reviews and audits will help us improve our performance at the construction site.”

Site C has a budget of $8.3 billion plus a project reserve of $440 million held by the Treasury Board, Conway said. Construction started with site preparation in summer 2015 and is scheduled to be completed in 2024.

B.C.’s auditor-general in 2011 criticized the Environmental Assessment Office for failing to oversee approved projects, resulting in the current enforcement field staff of five, three based in Victoria and one each in Prince George and Golden.

The assessment office conducted 25 site inspections in the 2015/16 fiscal year, and also works with the Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations, the B.C. Oil and Gas Commission and other provincial agencies to coordinate compliance oversight of projects.

The assessment office is updating its website in June to allow the public easier access to ongoing and past project files, including the inspection results from compliance and enforcement staff.

lpynn@postmedia.com

I awake to the sound of a gull and crows scrounging through my gear for food.

The gull thinks it has something, but it’s just a plastic baggie containing my pocket matches.

“Get out of here,” I scream. It obliges by flying away with the matches and landing out on the salt chuck.

So much for morning coffee. Then I discern activity at the distant end of Wreck Beach and find University of B.C. geography student Sanjay Carter-Rau with two of his friends. They’ve had a chilly, minimalist night in sleeping bags and blankets, but they do have a cigarette lighter to loan to kickstart my burner.

UBC student Sanjay Carter-Rau plays with his dog at Wreck Beach.

“It was freezing cold, but a bonfire kept us warm for most of the night,” he says, tossing a stick to this golden lab, Layla.

Carter-Rau is a Canadian citizen but grew up in Southern California, in San Bernardino, and views Wreck Beach as a form of field research. “I study people and places. I spend a lot of time around here.” 

On the way back to my tent I pass an unholy mess of garbage left by another group of young people partying last night — an unfathomable act in the midst of so much natural beauty and a reason why the beach is officially closed after sunset. 

By 8 a.m., people are already starting to stream down from the University of B.C. with their coffees and headphones to greet the day in style.

Although the winds have intensified, whipping up whitecaps on the Strait of Georgia, my paddle route up the north arm of the Fraser River is protected by a rock breakwater and log booms.

It is an ebb tide and already the muddy shallows are visible near the marshy shoreline.

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A middle-aged man with an English accent walking two dogs on a trail shouts that he can’t recall seeing a kayak here before, certainly not at this time of the year.

“You’re like a robin, the first sign of spring,” he says. I hate to nitpick, but robins are around all winter in flocks, dispersing by February-March to become more widespread and visible.

Captain Vancouver

When Captain George Vancouver passed the mouth of the Fraser River in June 1792 during the spring freshet, he made no direct mention in his journals of B.C.’s greatest waterway, which would have flowed wildly at its own discretion. He does describe a “very low land, apparently a swampy flat, that retires several miles” and features “two openings” (the north and middle arm of the Fraser) navigable only by canoes and strewn with “logs of wood, and stumps of trees innumerable.”

Today, as people shed their clothes at Wreck Beach, the region also sheds its skin. This is a demarcation point, where the urban oceanfront gives way to a more rustic foreshore of mud and marsh beating to the timeless rhythm of the Fraser River. 

Richmond boasts 443 oceanfront properties, according to a review of BC Assessment information by Landcor Data Corp. They include 264 residential, 86 commercial, 66 parks and green spaces, and 27 industrial, with a combined value of $2.7 billion.

Bulrushes along the north arm of the Fraser River next to Vancouver south of Wreck Beach.

I proceed along the wooded southwest corner of Point Grey, past forests of bulrushes. Among the waterfowl I flush up are hundreds of common mergansers, a fish-eating duck normally seen in small numbers but known to gather before moving to inland streams to breed. (Rob Butler, a retired senior bird researcher from the Canadian Wildlife Service, later confirmed it to be a new discovery along a rarely visited stretch of the Fraser. “An amazing number,” he said. “Your observation is significant.”)

Paddling against the current becomes a slog as the river narrows. Still, this is a better route than venturing out into the Strait of Georgia to navigate around both the federal 6.7-kilometre-long north-arm jetty and Metro Vancouver’s publicly accessible Iona jetty, which extends four kilometres and parallels a sewage outfall pipe from the Iona treatment plant.

Sun reporter Larry Pynn waits for a tidal change on the north arm of the Fraser River at the Iona jetty.

With ever more mudflats ahead, I paddle across to the Richmond side where Iona Beach Regional Park offers the potential for a haulout. These are the roughest waters encountered yet: lots of pleasure and commercial boat traffic plus standing waves created by the winds butting heads with the river current.

A tug boat slows down, but still creates a wall of water that could easily capsize an inexperienced paddler, especially in a canoe.

I pull ashore for lunch on the south shore for 90 minutes, watching flights come and go at Vancouver International Airport, until a flood tide makes it easier for me to continue upriver. While paddling alongside an empty barge I appreciate how easy it is to die on the water. If I were to capsize and be carried by the current underneath the curved bow of the barge, I might never be seen again … until my neoprene booties float shore with my feet a couple of years hence.

Dog walker Deborah Koyanagi with six furry clients at McDonald Beach Park in Richmond.

I eventually paddle into a protected boat launch at McDonald Beach Park, a popular area for off-leash dog walkers. Curiously, one man keeps his dog on leash while swimming it around the perimeter of the dock.

This is an ocean expedition, not an exploration of the Fraser River, per se. So I transport the kayak by truck another day to the next continuation point, the middle arm of the Fraser, just downstream from No. 2 Road Bridge and the Olympic oval.

Peter Teoh is walking past on the dike just as I am hauling my kayak down to the water’s edge.

“That’s an adventure,” he says of my trip. “Meet a lot of people and see a lot of things.”

Teoh came to Canada from Malaysia in 1979 and owns a Tim Hortons franchise in Richmond. He adopted his two rescue dogs from Seattle eight years ago.

“We had a contact and they said, ‘Oh, you should do the right thing instead of buying from the animal farm.’ (The dogs have) been good.”

The winds and tide push me swiftly downriver past float planes next to the south airport and the Flying Beaver Bar and Grill.

Natural habitat

A dozen mallards poke around next to the rip-rap rock shoring up the dike. Wigeon ducks take off almost vertically at my approach, compared with the low-level clumsiness of the cormorants.

Swishwash Island — one of the finest remnants of undisturbed habitat left in the lower Fraser — is on my right at the shallow mouth of the middle arm. BC Packers turned the 29-hectare island over to the Nature Conservancy of Canada in 1999 and it remains off limits to the public. It remains an intertidal habitat for juvenile salmon, a breeding, resting and feeding site for more than 100 bird species, and home to aquatic mammals such as river otters, beavers and muskrats.

I round the corner and watch the shoreline homes give way to green space and public trails, including the 14-hectare Terra Nova Rural Park. Vast marshes vibrating with waterfowl portend Sturgeon Bank, a 5,152-hectare provincial wildlife management area critical for birds and juvenile fish spanning the west side of Richmond. 

Two immature bald eagles perch on an old wooden radar reflector for aircraft at Sturgeon Bank in Richmond.

Two immature bald eagles perch on a large red circular wooden structure, a shoreline radar reflector from a bygone era. Several trumpeter swans swim in the distance. And a deafening flock of a few thousand snow geese flies directly overhead, soon to begin its annual migration to nesting grounds on Wrangel Island in Russian Siberia.

I keep about 100 metres offshore to avoid grounding out in the mud and wrestle with headwinds along my exposed route.

Sturgeon Bank may seem untouched compared with the pace of development in west Richmond in recent decades, but the area is suffering its own unique problems. Research by Environment Canada scientist Sean Boyd shows that some areas of the marsh have receded by up to 500 metres during more than two decades, even as those off Westham Island to the south have remained relatively stable. One theory is that dredging of the lower Fraser along with the jetties have pushed more sediments out into the strait and starved the marshes — or have increased salinity levels beyond plant tolerance.

The port dredges about 2.5 to three million cubic metres of sediment annually.

Another thought is that rising nitrogen levels, perhaps due to urban run-off, municipal sewage and agriculture, may be putting the marsh plants at risk. It’s also possible the die-off is simply a natural cycle.

Federal and provincial officials are working together on further research, since the implications are serious for birds, young fish and people. Loss of the marshes would allow rising sea levels to hammer away at exposed municipal dikes.

“During large storm events, there’d be nothing there to attenuate the wave action,” said Brent Gurd, a biologist with the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations. “You might need more maintenance of the dikes.”

Residential housing begins again at Blundell Road, south of the Quilchena Golf and Country Club — mostly modest-looking homes despite assessed values of about $1.5 million to $1.9 million, followed by rows of townhouses at closer to $1 million.

There is also a relic farm here owned by Harold Steves, the veteran Richmond councillor whose great-grandfather, Manoah, settled the community in 1877.

The farm is about four hectares: one zoned residential, the rest outside the dike and zoned agricultural but also within an environmental reserve in which farm buildings are disallowed. He grows heirloom vegetable seeds, 22 apple varieties, Saskatoon berries and raises chicken and cattle. The farmhouse turns 100 next year and is being restored for heritage designation.

Steves has led the fight for agricultural preservation since the early 1970s and is now concerned about the impact of increased port development and the planned bridge to replace the George Massey Tunnel between Richmond and Delta.

He also has a lesser-known past in the fishing industry. Across the river off Westham Island, he used to fish in a “14-foot clinker-built boat” distinguished by overlapping hull planks and used nets cut in half lengthwise that fished only half as deep. “When they had the big salmon runs, they’d become trapped between two jetties,” Steves recalled. “With small boats and hand-pulled nets, it was a bonanza. They were sitting ducks.”

Steveston

My paddling route becomes murkier as I approach the village of Steveston on the main, or south, arm of the Fraser River. The mudflats continue to grow on the receding tide and the federal Steveston jetty, extending 8.5 kilometres in six sections into the strait at Sand Heads, blocks my immediate passage.

I call Vancouver Whale Watch on my cellphone and owner Cedric Towers advises me to paddle up a small opening leading to Scotch Pond, the former site of a Musqueam village and commercial cannery operation, near Garry Point Park.

It’s a tough slog against the current flowing through the confined channel, but I eventually wend my way to the Fraser’s shoreline and pull my kayak up onto a sandy beach affording close-up views of the fishing fleet heading out for herring.

Paraglider Denis Roumiantsev does some ground training at Garry Point Park in Steveston. 

Denis Roumiantsev is practising ground manoeuvres on his paraglider. Garry Point is the perfect place because it is exposed to winds from any direction. “Other places, in the city, are blocked by the buildings; it’s gusty.”

The weather is also likely to be better than the North Shore. He’s from Russia, but has lived 16 years in Vancouver, paragliding for 12 of those.

“It’s the cheapest way to fly,” he asserts.

A sandy beach on the south arm of the Fraser River at Garry Point Park in Steveston.

At Oceanside Fisheries, dock worker Rob Clarke advises of the dangers lurking just offshore.

“It’s deceiving; the river runs pretty good down the channel,” he warns, adding that I should beware of the largest ships. “You get one of these car freighters that come in here all the time and they make a huge wake, a rush of water.”

History oozes through the Steveston mud: the Gulf of Georgia Cannery, Britannia Shipyards, London Heritage Farm, and, just upriver, the rustic community of Finn Slough. 

Forgotten history

There is one piece of history that has been buried by the sediments of time — until now.

Jerry Vernon, president of the Vancouver chapter of the Canadian Aviation Historical Society, provided me with a copy of the official logs of RCAF Sea Island No. 133 fighter squadron for May 25, 1944, one year before Germany’s surrender to the Allies in the Second World War.

It was a different time: harbour seals were persecuted as a “menace to the fishing industry” and the military offered a helping hand. Kittyhawk fighters flew out to a sandbar about six kilometres south of the Steveston jetty. According to the logs, two fighters dropped 100-pound delayed-fuse bombs, while two others “followed up the bombing exercise and strafed the seals as they hit the water for protection. The results were considered very good.” 

Harbour seal populations were heavily depleted by the time the Canadian government afforded them protection in the 1970s. Today, they are back in healthy numbers — 40,000 or so in the Strait of Georgia — helping to boost populations of mammal-eating transient, or Bigg’s killer whales.

Their story illustrates the continuing power of the human hand to shape the destiny of the globally significant Fraser River delta and all it benefits — for worse or for better.

lpynn@postmedia.com

Karst experts from around the world are lending support to an NDP private member’s bill designed to protect B.C.’s fragile and extensive cave systems from damage by individuals and corporations such as logging and mining companies.

Scott Fraser, MLA for Alberni-Pacific Rim, a hot bed of karst on Vancouver Island, plans to introduce the B.C. Cave Protection Act later this week. 

“I’ve contacted the world’s experts and all agree that B.C. is in desperate need of proper legislation,” he said in an interview. 

Karst refers to soluble rocks such as limestone and marble formed by naturally acidic water seeping through the subsurface calcium carbonate rock. The process can form caves or caverns, passageways, and fantastic but easily damaged speleothems such as columns, curtains, flowstone, soda straws, stalactites and stalagmites. 

Fines for individuals under the proposed legislation would range up to $1,000 and/or 60 days in jail on first offence to as high as $5,000 and six months in jail for three or more offences. Corporations could be fined up to $50,000.

Among the global karst experts supporting the proposed legislation:; Jim Baichtal, Tongass National Forest, Alaska; Mike Buchanan, karstologist, United Kingdom; Derek Ford, emeritus professor, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont.; Kevin Kiernan, geomorphologist, Tasmania, Australia; Paul Griffiths, independent karst scientist, Campbell River; Carol Ramsey, who has a PhD in karstology from Slovenia and is also from Campbell River.

Baichtal said in a supporting letter he has visited numerous caves and karst areas on Vancouver Island and noted that protection of caves in Alaska would have been more difficult without passage of the U.S. federal Cave Resources Protection Act of 1988.

He said that B.C. also needs legislation to better resolve conservation disagreements between industry and resource managers over what constitutes damage and to strengthen legal language and “allow caves to receive the level of protection they need.”

Buchanan added he strongly recommends the B.C. government “go to extraordinary lengths” to protect all karst systems including their catchment areas for future generations, describing these ecosystems as “grossly overlooked and under protected.”

Ford said now is the time to act while the majority of B.C.’s caves are still in “exceptionally good” condition.

Fraser introduced a similar cave bill in 2010 under then-Premier Gordon Campbell, but is hoping to have better success this time around based on strong support from the scientific community.

Karst also makes for more productive rainforests, draining away extensive rainfall while the dissolved cracks in the bedrock give tree roots a good foothold against powerful winter winds. Karst also reduces the acidity of rainfall, providing improved habitat for aquatic life, including resident and migratory fish. Spawning salmon have been discovered swimming through one cave system on B.C.’s central coast.

Publication of the BC Breeding Bird Atlas is raising alarms about the decline of several species across the province. The atlas is one of the largest citizen-science initiatives in B.C. history. More than 1,300 volunteers contributed some 60,000 hours of their time over eight years to document the status of birds. A sampling includes:

Tree Swallow

Tree Swallow

Surveys indicate the species is in gradual decline, like other birds feeding on flying insects. The decline is slightly more pronounced in B.C. than Canada generally. Possible causes: insect declines due to pesticides, loss or pollution of wetlands, loss of nesting cavities due to scarcity of old trees (clear-cut logging, fire suppression) and competition from alien species such as the European starling. 

Pacific Wren

B.C. has a high global responsibility for this species. Guidelines for forest operations developed elsewhere should be evaluated for this province. This species is at its highest densities in wetter and older forests with considerable structure in terms of logs, snags and debris on the forest floor. Areas of harvested forest stands are less suitable.

A Pacific Wren

Western meadowlark

Significant declines, like other grassland bird species in North America. The species has lost more than half its Canadian population since 1970. The population trend in B.C. is similar but slightly less steep than the national trend. The causes of this decline are likely habitat loss and degradation, both on the breeding grounds in Canada and the wintering grounds in the U.S. and Mexico.

Western Meadowlark

Rufous hummingbird

While the species’ range is expanding, populations have declined significantly since the 1970s for reasons not well understood. Monitoring of population trends should continue, with banding. Research should include the effects of landscape changes on population distribution and breeding success.

Evening grosbeak

Across Canada, populations have shown a large decrease since 1970, likely due to factors such as large-scale forestry, disease and reduced food due to fewer forest insect infestations, especially spruce budworm. It may be that the recent decline is largely a return to normal levels as budworm outbreaks have declined. Collisions with moving cars are a common source of mortality.

Evening Grosbeak

Source: BC Breeding Bird Atlas, birdatlas.bc.ca

If we just left things alone, Canoe Pass wouldn’t be the quiet little backwater that it is, all but forgotten next to the other three arms of the Fraser River. That’s not how it works on the industrial lower Fraser.

Some 14 federal structures, including the Steveston and north arm jetties, are located in the lower Fraser to stabilize the course of the river and help maintain channel depths for navigation past communities such as Steveston. One study by GeoSea Consulting Canada Ltd. estimated that 16 per cent of the Fraser’s flow goes through the north and middle arms around Sea Island, 70 per cent through the south arm, and 14 per cent through Canoe Pass. 

It’s fine with me that Canoe Pass is runt of the litter on the sprawling delta. On this clear, crisp morning, it emerges as a bucolic and beautiful stretch of shoreline devoid of the larger vessels so menacing to paddlers on other stretches of the lower Fraser.

I haul my kayak across the rip-rap boulders shoring up the dike and launch just downstream from the Westham Island bridge, linking Ladner to Westham Island.

Canoe Pass next to Westham Island in South Delta is the little-known fourth arm of the Fraser River. 

Bounty of bird life

One sign on the dike tells me I am officially entering an Important Bird Area, while another says I can shoot the birds provided I keep out 150 metres. Westham Island is a regional destination with its cottage farming and George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary, where hunters are allowed to line the perimeter with shotguns in season to blast the same waterfowl people pay to view.

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• Water's Edge: Shapes, sizes and values of oceanfront condos revealed

More than 40 per cent of Metro Vancouver’s oceanfront is found in Delta, yet it is among the least explored by paddlers due in large part to lack of access and challenging geography.

Wood pilings are all that remains of the historic Brunswick Cannery site at Canoe Pass in Delta. 

A bracing northwest wind ripples across the water as I paddle downstream against a flood tide and steer the kayak through a phalanx of old wood pilings — remnants of the Brunswick cannery that operated here from 1897 to 1930. The cannery later served as a fish camp, and net and boat storage, and in 1961 was acquired as part of the Roberts Bank expropriation. The buildings were demolished in 1983, more evidence of B.C.’s once-vibrant cannery past washed away.

The Coast Mountains form a thin snowy line on the northern horizon above the stubble of grass rising from the flat landscape. On the southern bank I closely follow the footprint of Brunswick Point, a marsh and popular birding area that extends out into the Strait of Georgia. I seriously think about getting out and hauling the kayak across the mud and grass when a channel suddenly opens up. It makes for easy paddling toward open water past the unmoving heads of great blue herons visible just above the vegetation.

Open, yes, but very shallow. The hull of the kayak barely skims the muddy bottom, forcing me to use my paddle like a pole to move ever so slowly out to deeper water.

I’m paddling a vast area known as The Flats off Roberts Bank. The ocean may look vast here but may be no more than two metres deep even at high tide. Roberts Bank is an 8,770-hectare provincial wildlife management area, critical habitat for fish (including juvenile salmon born in fresh water and acclimatizing to salty water), waterfowl, shorebirds, raptors and tiny invertebrates — in some cases, more than 1,000 per 10-centimetre-diameter core of mud.

Port expansion plans

Hundreds of thousands of western sandpipers migrating to their Arctic breeding grounds in spring bulk up on a thin layer of fatty microscopic algae on the mudflats. These productive conditions are not duplicated elsewhere, even as close as Boundary Bay, which puts additional scrutiny on the Port of Vancouver’s $2-billion container expansion plans at Roberts Bank.

The new terminal would provide an additional 2.4 million units of container capacity per year. In 2015, the port moved the equivalent of 3.1 million 20-foot container units — about half of those at Deltaport.

Westshore Terminals handles more than 33 million tonnes of coal per year.

What researchers have discovered is that a perfect alchemy of salinity, along with nutrients from the Fraser River, low daytime tides, warmer temperatures and longer daylight hours cause the algae to bulk up on omega-3 fatty acids.

The port notes that the expansion is taking place in deeper, sub-tidal waters to limit ecological impact and that other studies indicate the “velocity of currents will not change in high intertidal areas and therefore will not affect the biofilm community.”

Yet the port’s consultant, Hemmera, has been out on the Roberts Bank tidal flats collecting sandpipers for study at the same time as a second group of more than a dozen researchers — Environment Canada, academics and visitors from Japan — conducts its own research. The latter’s goal is to capture 50 sandpipers and 50 dunlin shorebirds in mist nets, take blood and breath samples, photograph their tongues and analyze their feces. Eight of each will be further dissected back in the lab.

To watch, say, synchronized flocks of 20,000 sandpipers forage on the biofilm next to the marshes at high tide is one of B.C.’s greatest wildlife experiences.  

“That’s why we’re here,” explains Bob Elner, an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University and emeritus scientist with Environment Canada. “It’s probably the most under-appreciated phenomenon in Canada.”

Conveyors load coal at Westshore Terminals coal site on Roberts Bank. 

I paddle 50 to 100 metres offshore of the 3.5-kilometre causeway leading to Deltaport and Westshore Terminals. Truckers watch me with curiosity, as I do the giant gantries moving containers.

By the time I paddle to the end of the causeway, I am well out into the strait, fully exposed to the growing winds, with little prospect of a safe haulout along the rip-rap shoreline.

With relief, I scurry around the port facility’s northwest corner and into protected waters. Mountains of coal rise above the shoreline and the cascading sound of a coal train moving forward sounds like a 747 on takeoff. 

This is one of my strangest kayak trips — a flea among elephants. Truth is, there are relatively few vessel movements compared with traffic on the lower Fraser or the Vancouver waterfront.

Local wildlife

Even here, nature abounds. In spring, dozens of male California sea lions crowd onto the ships’ mooring buoys, barking and jostling for position. Up to 2,000 migrate north to B.C. waters, arriving in fall and heading south again in spring to join the ladies for the breeding season in Southern California and Mexico.

A wayward “false killer whale” — known as Willy, or Westshore Willy — made his home in local waters, including the port, from 1990 to 2003 and may have been the last remaining member of a group that wandered into B.C. waters in 1987.

I paddle under a conveyor delivering coal to the 291-metre bulk carrier Pan Iris and spot a new section, replaced after an accident involving the ship, Cape Apricot, in December 2012. The terminal was badly damaged and 30 tonnes of coal were dumped into the water. 

A federal transportation safety board report determined that poor communications between the pilot and ship’s master, as well as inadequate safety planning, were factors in the crash. The B.C. pilot was so devastated that he resigned, taking early retirement after 20 years’ service.

I paddle my kayak, barely four metres in length, under the nose of the 292-metre container vessel, Simon LD, and continue on toward the Tsawwassen ferry terminal next door. I have checked the sailing timings for Duke Point near Nanaimo, Swartz Bay on Vancouver Island, and the Southern Gulf Islands, and casually paddle past the entrance with confidence I won’t be scrunched.

The 292-metre-long cargo ship Simon LD loading containers at Deltaport off Roberts Bank.

The Tsawwassen terminal handled 3.7 million passengers last year, more than any in the BC Ferries system.

BC Ferries’ Queen of New Westminster at Tsawwassen terminal. 

I pull my kayak up on the rocks next to the ticket booth and wander up to see if I can get a well-deserved hot lunch in one of the fast food outlets in a little strip mall. No such luck. The attendant tells me that Transport Canada policy forbids me from going there — even for a lousy slice of pizza — without buying a ferry ticket. 

Fine. I use the washroom and grab a bag of chips from a vending machine and retreat to the shoreline to eat.

Although quiet today, the shoreline along the 1.6-kilometre causeway can be busy on warm weekends with a unique subculture of beachgoers who are content to picnic right beside a very busy roadway. Some even wade into the water to their chests with nets — like the last of the hunter-gatherers — in search of Dungeness crabs.

The waters are remarkably clear here, ironically so. I am a short paddle from major passenger ferries and ocean-going ships capable of causing major damage in our region’s most ecologically important waters. Port-related expansion projects threaten to heighten those risks, both in pollution and generation of underwater noise.

One mistake, one major accident, and everything from the smallest crustaceans to the largest marine predators will pay the price.

lpynn@postmedia.com

The clear waters along the Tsawwassen ferry causeway in South Delta.

There is no line in the sand marking the international boundary on the oceanfront at Point Roberts. A marker offshore officially indicates the border, but on the shoreline the forested cliffs and gravel beaches extend seamlessly from Canada into the U.S. 

On the B.C. side, in Tsawwassen, the cliff landscape is reminiscent of Wreck Beach, only with homes: a long row on the water, and a second tier, English Bluff up above, with commanding views of the BC Ferries terminal and the Strait of Georgia.

In Washington state, the feel is more Wreck Beach without homes and people.

The rules are different here in the U.S., where the waterfront can be privately owned down to low tide. Beach walkers who casually stroll back and forth across the border risk not only private trespass but running afoul of U.S. enforcement agencies.

Overhead, bald eagles enjoy diplomatic immunity: 50 or so of them, mainly juveniles, soaring aimlessly on the warm thermals.

At sea level, strong northwest winds slam me from the side as I continue southward into American territory. I frequently paddle off Point Roberts but wouldn’t dream of doing so on a day like this. Yet here I am, aiming the bow towards the biggest waves to avoid capsizing while staying out of the punishing surf zone.

Larry Pynn on part of his oceanfront tour of Metro Vancouver off Boundary Bay. 

The wooded bluffs eventually peter out at the Reef Tavern, owned by Nick Kiniski, son of the late Edmonton-born professional bad-boy wrestler Gene Kiniski, who described himself as “Canada’s greatest athlete” even though he lived in Blaine, Wash.

A little history

Point Roberts, named by Captain George Vancouver for his friend and Royal Navy officer Henry Roberts, was once a popular watering hole for Canadians. Expo 86 was the beginning of the end with the legalization of Sunday drinking in B.C. Growing intolerance of drinking and driving along with the ability of Canadian border officers to make arrests for impaired driving starting in 1998 sealed the peninsula’s fate as a party playground.

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Today, the Reef is a little rough around the edges, but remains one of the region’s best unpretentious places to sit outside with a beer on a sunny day and sup up the ocean view. The experience during summer might include the sighting of a pod of southern resident killer whales navigating the coastline in search of salmon.

Home prices

Canadians own most of the properties on Point Roberts and prices are a bargain: treed lots start at about $20,000 and oceanfront homes well under $1 million and up in US currency. Among the Vancouver Canucks who have owned property here for tax reasons over the years are forward Alex Mogilny, head coaches Mike Keenan and John Tortorella, and goalie-turned-coach Glen Hanlon.

Waterfront homes along Tsawwassen Beach, just north of Point Roberts, Wash., facing the Strait of Georgia. 

A short paddle beyond the Reef, the rugged jaw of Point Roberts reaches out into the strait at 8.5-hectare Lighthouse Park. 

Visitors gravitate to Lighthouse Park to camp, walk the gravel beaches, view marine life and have picnics. A flimsy wharf installed recently proved no match for the waves and has been removed. Herring spawn here and when the time is right dozens of harbour porpoises feed just offshore.

Brendan and Jaclyn Weidner of Cloverdale enjoy a sunny day at Point Roberts Lighthouse Park with their children Laurel, 4, and Everleigh, 21 months.

Brendan and Jaclyn Weidner of Cloverdale are enjoying a sunny day at the beach with their two children Laurel, 4, and Everleigh, 21 months. It is the family’s first time to Point Roberts and they’re staying at a friend’s cabin for a week.

“It’s beautiful, a nice offer for spring break,” says Jaclyn. “We drove around the whole place yesterday. This is our first stop and we might check out Lily Point tomorrow. There’s so many options.”

Rustic oceanfront homes near Lily Point in Point Roberts.

Although just 13 square kilometres, Point Roberts is remarkably diverse, with its beaches, bluffs, dry grasslands and forests.

I continue paddling into calmer waters past the Point Roberts Marina, which enjoys quicker access to the San Juan Islands and southern Gulf Islands than Metro Vancouver.

The last of the oceanfront homes — rustic, weather-beaten little places propped up on stilts — yields to the dramatic exposed cliffs of Lily Point, a 110-hectare park spared from development in 2008. Volcanic, snow-smothered Mount Baker shimmers on the Cascade Mountains skyline.

The snowy beacon of Mount Baker observed from Lighthouse Park in Point Roberts. 

When I round the corner to begin heading north again, currents converge and the shallow waters turn turbulent before squirting me out into Boundary Bay. Old pilings up ahead are remains of the Alaska Packers Association cannery, which operated in 1884-1917 and are a reminder of the long list of salmon-processing plants that once dotted the Pacific Northwest.

APA Road leading to the Lily Point parking lot is named after the historic cannery.

Canadian soil is now in sight again. Fifteen minutes of paddling takes me past a large concrete border marker to the residential Tsawwassen community of Boundary Bay, just south of Centennial Beach.

Oceanfront resident Joe Wood says there is no place like Boundary Bay in Tsawwassen. 

Oceanfront resident Joe Wood, a retired carpenter, walks over to chat and reports that he has personally explored the very places I have paddled with a small hovercraft.

“Impressive,” he says of my journey. “You must be tough.”

He asks whether a survival suit might have been a good idea, then makes the question redundant: “Well, you made it.”

When a neighbour peeks over her fence and asks why  I am taking Wood’s photo, he responds: “He’s being professionally friendly.”

I have disturbed hundreds, maybe thousands, of waterfowl while paddling something as quiet as a kayak and cringe at the environmental chaos generated by a personal hovercraft. Still, there is no provincial law against them and, to be fair, the government has designated Boundary Bay a last bastion for hunting of ducks and geese in urban Metro Vancouver. 

I continue paddling northward past a sprawling new home on Centennial Parkway with an assessed value of $5.3 million that is owned by Michele Toigo, wife of Ron, whose extensive business holdings range from White Spot to The Vancouver Giants.

An oceanfront home owned by Michele Toigo, wife of Ron, whose businesses include White Spot and The Vancouver Giants, on Centennial Parkway at Boundary Bay in Tsawwassen. 

This eastern side of Tsawwassen is home to the greatest vistas in Metro Vancouver. From here you can see both the Coast Mountains and Cascade Mountains, including Mount Cheam near Agassiz, the Gulf and San Juan islands, and the residential highrises of Burnaby’s Metrotown and the New Westminster riverfront.

It is also home to the greatest collection of birds in Canada in winter.

The community of Beach Grove — once a cottage destination for Vancouverites and now featuring an eclectic mix of bungalows and modern multimillion-dollar oceanfront homes — quickly yields to some of the finest farmland in Canada. Defined by mild winters, warm summers and a relatively narrow range of temperatures, it boasts one of the longest frost-free periods in Canada.

Delta, Richmond and Surrey produce 14 per cent of B.C.’s total farm gate receipts based on just 2.2 per cent of the farmed land. Traditional soil-based crops such as potatoes and vegetables compete with industrial greenhouses and monocultures such as blueberries that chip away at important habitat for waterfowl.

Mark Cantwell had anticipated another enjoyable day of free-dive snorkelling off Victoria’s Clover Point, photographing sea urchins and other common marine life.

What the Environment Canada policy advisor got was the experience of a lifetime — a close encounter with a species never before documented in B.C. waters, the Pacific angel shark.

“Fantastic, I was pretty pumped,” he said in an interview on Friday. 

Cantwell was swimming near shore in his wetsuit on April 30 when another diver, Henry Fisher, reported spotting an unidentifiable creature on the ocean bottom, about 10 metres down.

“We both went down and I didn’t know what it was. It looked like a skate, triangular and so forth.”

Cantwell took photos, which he posted to a local snorkelling website.

It didn’t take long before someone suggested it was a rare Pacific angel shark. Fisheries and Oceans Canada soon confirmed it to be the first official sighting of the species in B.C. waters.

“I look into it more and the first thing I see is a YouTube video of a guy being attacked by an angel shark,” Cantwell continues. “The thing I learned is that they lay in the sand and remain immobile … until something swims by its mouth and then it strikes.

“I’m glad I didn’t get any closer than two or three feet.”

Cantwell has served 27 years with Environment Canada, much of that as a meteorologist, and is interested to know whether the species has been in B.C. waters all along and went undiscovered until now or whether it is evidence of bigger forces underway in the Pacific Ocean. 

“The question becomes, is it a species this far north because of climate change and El Nino?” he said. “That’s the story I’m interested in conveying.”

Jackie King, a federal research scientist based at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, confirmed that “angel sharks have not been reported from B.C.”

The question becomes, is it a species this far north because of climate change and El Nino?

There are numerous online references to the sharks being found from Alaska to the Gulf of California and even parts of South America, but King is aware of only one reported sighting off southeastern Alaska in 1907. 

The only other reported local sighting occurred in Puget Sound in Washington state in 1932.

The shark is so unusual looking that false sightings are unlikely.

“Sightings are extremely rare, but can happen,” King said. While the shark is not migratory, it is possible that warmer conditions are pushing the species farther north.

Officially, 14 species of sharks have now been documented in B.C. waters.

According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, angel sharks grow to about 1.5 metres and eat small fish and molluscs. The sharks spend their days buried in the sand, perfectly camouflaged by their grey, brown and black colourings. “When an unsuspecting fish comes near, the shark lunges upward, sucks the fish into its huge mouth and swallows it whole,” the aquarium reports.

Some sharks such as hammerheads must swim to breathe. Angel sharks have muscles that pump water over their gills and through spiracles (holes) in their heads, allowing them to “snooze quietly on the bottom or wait in ambush for prey without moving,” the aquarium said.

Due to overfishing into the 1980s, populations decreased in California, according to the aquarium. Now there are limits on the minimum catch size, and gillnet fishing is banned inshore of five kilometres. The population is thought to be rebounding.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature rates the angel shark as “near threatened.”

lpynn@postmedia.com

Surrey’s answer to West Vancouver’s Marine Drive lies up on a bluff, a stretch of extravagant homes on expansive properties tucked away among the natural forest along Crescent Road.

Down below, on the Nicomekl River, it’s a much different story: murky waters laced with agricultural pollutants writhe their way beneath the Highway 99 freeway west to Mud Bay and the Pacific Ocean.

The place has the gritty vibe of a southern bayou, right down to the dilapidated shotgun shacks — one with a cross above the front door, next to a no trespassing sign.

It is an unlikely place to find oyster beds, but here they are, laid out at low tide in densities I have seen nowhere else on the B.C. coast. Look, but don’t touch, and certainly don’t eat. The Crescent Oyster Company, incorporated in 1904, operated here with Sikh labourers who lived in bunk houses on stilts above the mud flats and worked the beds with flat-bottomed skiffs. BC Packers took over in 1958 and harvesting ended in 1963 when the river became too polluted to ensure product safety.

Oyster beds, too contaminated for human consumption, exposed at low tide on the Nicomekl River in South Surrey near Crescent Beach. 

A sign at the municipal boat launch at Ward’s Marina in Elgin Heritage Park warns visitors to not even think about it.

Still, the gulls don’t seem to mind. Do they ever? They fly up into the air to drop shellfish onto the rocks to open them up — and seem no worse for wear. There are ducks here, too. Plenty of them. The mallards waddle across exposed mud flats as slick and shiny as freshly “Zambonied” ice.

It’s important to stick to the middle of the channel or risk getting stuck on an ebb tide as the waters flow downstream past the BNSF rail bridge that swings back and forth to accommodate train or sail boat traffic, past the entrance to Crescent Beach Marina with its collection of pleasure and commercial fishing boats, past the noted birding area of Blackie Spit and on to Crescent Beach and its character oceanfront homes and sunny afternoon beachgoers.

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Dangerous cargo

Unlike other areas I have paddled, where seaside homes are hidden away from peering eyes, those at Crescent Beach are goldfish bowls to be scrutinized by pedestrians as much as the sweeping ocean views.

Residents of South Surrey and White Rock have big concerns about rail traffic through their oceanfront communities.

If BNSF stuck to a few trains carrying simple stuff such as lumber or automobiles, it might not be so bad, but the tracks just get busier and all manner of dangerous goods are lurking within the black rail cars that rumble past the homes.

Hydrochloric acid, sodium chlorate, sodium hydroxide, ethanol, crude oil, glycol and diesel fuel are among the commodities capable of causing a human and environmental catastrophe.

In Crescent Beach, the tracks also cut the community off from road access in the event of a rail emergency. In White Rock, the railway effectively robs the community of true oceanfront homes, since it is the tracks that border the waterfront.

Surrey resident Jodi Beaubier kayaks off Crescent Beach in South Surrey.

You’d expect a higher valuation given the ocean location. Then we hear the whistle of a cargo train coming down the tracks only a few metres from his back door.

There are sounds a homeowner gets used to, but not this one, not since July 2013 when a runaway train of 72 tank cars loaded with crude oil crashed at Lac-Megantic, Quebec, killing 47 people and destroying half the downtown area.

“That was a game changer,” agrees Seiz, president of the Crescent Beach Property Owners Association. “It really highlighted what was possible” and shed light on an “an industry going about it’s business unquestioned for a long time.”

White Rock council has passed a motion to begin looking at the potential of moving the tracks away from the residential waterfront. The local press has accused Dianne Watts, Conservative MP and former Surrey mayor, of dragging her feet on the issue.

Normally, oceanfront residents want to keep outsiders away from their stretch of paradise. Not Seiz. He would only be too happy to see the tracks pulled and the rail corridor converted to a walking and cycling corridor, a “green super highway” connecting not just with White Rock but all the way to Vancouver and central Surrey.

“Free up the foreshore,” he urges. “It could be a viable green transportation link.”

That is for the future. Today, I resume kayaking along the shoreline and soon watch the people and homes disappear, leaving only the wooded bluffs, the tracks, and the rip-rap rock extending to the water line.

The calm waters are achingly clear, and the warm spring sun is intoxicating. Life is not just good on the water, but it is free of everything that clutters one’s life on land: traffic, mortgages, deadlines, conflicts, work … oh wait, this IS my work!

I pass a pedestrian overpass at 24th Avenue that leads safely over the tracks to the shore, then a pedestrian underpass at 16th Avenue that links up with 1001 Steps Park, which, by my count, comes in at closer to 230.

A pedestrian walkway beneath railway tracks near 16th Avenue in south Surrey provides beach access.

At one with nature

A man sunbathes nude among the rocks in an area that “naturists” call Crescent Rock Beach after a granite boulder carried here during the last ice age — um, a geological exposure, you might say. The nudist area extends generally from Crescent Beach to White Rock, where limited access allows for relative privacy.

Nature also thrives here. A mature bald eagle sweeps down from the forest and scoops up a flounder just off my bow. Why the flounder is at the surface and not the ocean bottom I do not know, but the fish’s flat white bottom side is unmistakable as the eagle flies past to eat its catch in peace.

I catch glimpses of more high-end homes on large lots up on the bluffs in the neighbourhood of Ocean Park. Among them is a five-bedroom, nine-bath mansion on Indian Fort Drive owned by former Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers president Russ Cmolik with an assessed value of $12 million on an 85,000-square-foot lot.

Rounding the corner beneath Kwomais Point Park, I head south into Semiahmoo Bay and watch the ocean bottom change from mostly rocks and seaweed to sand. A big Dungeness crab walks just out of reach below the kayak. The crab is named after Dungeness, Wash., which Captain George Vancouver named in 1792 after a locale on the coast of Kent, England.

A dozen or so harlequin ducks rest on the exposed rocks, while cormorants pop up in the nearby waters.

A fanciful home on Marine Drive in White Rock.

White Rock Pier — the only one of its kind in the region, extending 470 metres into the bay — is backdropped by Mount Baker and the snowy Cascade Mountains of Washington state. The orderly tiered homes of White Rock rise up the sharp slope from Marine Drive and its long row of restaurants that spring to life on warm days. There is no parallel in the region. This is a place to be seen and to sit outdoors on patios and watch the hot rods, convertibles and motorcycles cruise past.

The pier in White Rock provides access for moorage, fishing and crabbing. 

Out here, on the water, one is removed from it all. A couple on paddleboards remarks there are lots of harbour seals ahead, closer to the pier. Indeed, they emerge from all over, the most I’ve seen since my visit to Wreck Beach. They are known to come face-to-face with scuba divers under water, but on the surface they remain elusive, keeping their distance.

I aim for the deep end of the pier where visitors gather to fish or toss out crab nets or stare aimlessly into the water. Andrew Newman is working on an inflatable craft for his new business, White Rock Sea Tours and Whale Watching. I am not convinced that the endangered resident killer whales of the Salish Sea need to be shadowed by yet another commercial operation, but he believes the industry can be stewards, not harassers, of the cetaceans.

“Looking out for them and setting an example,” says the former coast guard auxiliary member. “Keeping a distance and making sure they are unencumbered by other traffic.”

I paddle as far up the beach as possible, then get out and walk up to Marine Drive for a basket of fish and chips.

A journey’s end

The exposed sands reaching out into the bay also represent the ebb tide of my journey.

But there is still one stretch of oceanfront to go, one of the least known of all, virtually invisible to the hordes visiting not just White Rock but making their way across the Douglas-Blaine border crossing.

The Semiahmoo First Nation is bordered by the Highway 99 freeway, Pacific Ocean/railway tracks and Campbell River, which backs up during high tides, where it runs through exquisite forest lands.

The band has about 90 members and earned notoriety last year when it was revealed that Chief Willard Cook earned $267,309, while councillor Joanne Charles received $187,138 — tax free — while many members lived in relative squalor.

The reserve is also home to non-natives living on leased land. I am attracted to a tended property with a glorious bed of yellow daffodils and red tulips growing out of a small old boat.

Joan Rowland and her husband manage a Royal Canadian Legion community of recreational trailers on leased land from the Semiahmoo First Nation. 

Joan Rowland is enjoying a glass of red wine on her patio. She and her husband, Ron, manage the Royal Canadian Legion Memorial Camp, which includes 81 recreational sites — small trailers under individual roofs — on leased band lands. Members pay $2,300 rent for a full year, and trailers rarely sell for more than $30,000.

“So far, we haven’t been taken over by condos and townhouses,” she says.

When Ron walks by, she says: “This gentleman is from The Sun and he’s found us. He drove in here and started taking pictures.” His piece of paradise exposed, he utters “shit” with a smile, then returns to his chores.  

Rowland looks out onto the pockets of water shimmering in the distance at low tide and fully appreciates her unique lease on life: the sunsets, the storms, the nature, the rural lifestyle so close to urban amenities.

“It’s heaven,” she confirms, while casting a glance at my tape recorder. “That’s why we don’t tell anybody about it.”

And for that, I apologize. My series has exposed spots that locals would just as soon have kept secret. On the other hand, it has revealed an oceanfront more varied and fascinating than we could have imagined, a landscape worth more than any price determined by market forces, a place that defines our region and is deserving of us all.

lpynn@postmedia.com

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When we look out at the craggy industrial face of the Port of Vancouver, we see freighters from around the world, piles of sulphur and coal, grain unloaded from rail cars into silos, commercial float planes, tugs, ferries and gantries moving container cargo.

Much less obvious is the natural world that defies the odds and makes its home within the bustling waters and unyielding infrastructure of the inner harbour.

At Harbour Green Park at Cordova and Bute, a half-circle of large orange buoys gives no indication of the protected forests of bull kelp and fish flourishing beneath the surface.

Next door, Vancouver Convention Centre delegates are oblivious to the range of conservation measures built in to the facility. Crew substituted clean soils for sediments polluted with old industrial hydrocarbons, constructed reef, shoal and islet habitat, and installed pipes for rockfish, and heavy chains for invertebrates. Some 100 marine species are thought to frequent the site, about one-third more than before construction of the facility in 2009. 

“It’s pretty unique, compared to other harbours in the world,” Carrie Brown, the port’s environmental director, says of the wildlife. “We have something very special here.”

Vancouver’s inner harbour is a commercial and industrial hub, but is also important to marine life.  

Society tends to focus on the value of residential properties on the waterfront, but the inner harbour is where you find the big numbers. According to BC Assessment figures compiled by Landcor Data Corp, the Vancouver Convention Centre tops the scale at $658 million, followed by Canada Place at $117 million and Vancouver Shipyards at $79 million.

The port’s value to the natural world — invertebrates, fish, birds, even visiting killer whales — is not as easy valued, and nor is critical habitat already lost to industry.

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A new report by engineering consultants Kerr Wood Leidal for the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation notes that about half of Burrard Inlet’s shoreline has been altered, 53 kilometres of natural shoreline lost, and 93 per cent of the inlet’s estuaries gobbled up by development.

There is no quick fix for reversing more than a century of industrial degradation in the inner harbour.

A closer look

Just getting out to see the issues is no easy task.

Rowing and paddling are prohibited from Lions Gate Bridge to Berry Point just east of Second Narrows Bridge, with an exception made for the Vancouver Rowing Club in Coal Harbour near Stanley Park.

So I leave my kayak on shore and join Rob Butler and Rod MacVicar of the Pacific Wildlife Foundation, along with Brown, aboard a seven-metre aluminum vessel for a close-up look at the tension between nature and industry.

Rob Butler of the Pacific Wildlife Foundation.

We have barely left dock at Harbour Green Park, proceeding into a brewing storm, when Butler raises a pair of binoculars toward two western grebes within a much larger flock of surf scoters.

“We used to see hundreds of them in the mid-90s,” reflects the former federal bird scientist. “People would hear them calling. Now there’s just a handful.”

The grebes have long, slender swanlike necks and one of the world’s most remarkable mating dances — pairs rising up in unison and paddling rapidly across the water surface. The species is provincially red-listed, at risk, in part, due to human disturbance on its inland breeding grounds: Salmon Arm, north Okanagan Lake and Duck Lake near Creston. While wintering in areas such as Vancouver harbour, it is also vulnerable to pollution and a lack of forage fish such as sand lance and herring.

Burrard Inlet and English Bay officially comprise an Important Bird Area, a unique declaration in Canada for the inner harbour of a major port. While the designation has no teeth, it does highlight the port’s global significance for the grebe, Barrow’s goldeneye and surf scoter, and national significance for the great blue heron.

Thick-beaked surf scoters are common visitors to Port of Vancouver in winter. 

Butler was lead author on a report published in 2015 (based on monthly surveys 2011-13) on marine birds in Burrard Inlet, Indian Arm and English Bay. It showed that birds eating mussels such as the scoters are doing relatively well compared with fish eaters like the grebes. One-day numbers of greater scaup peaked at 1,627 and surf scoters at 7,557 in December/January, Barrows goldeneye at 2,133 in February, white-winged scoters at 2,502 and bufflehead at 252 in March, and glaucous-winged gulls at 4,114 in September.

Marbled murrelets are threatened seabirds seen only occasionally in Port of Vancouver. 

Herring are critical to the food chain but their eggs fail to develop on creosote wood pilings. In response, streamkeepers have successfully wrapped pilings with plastic netting in areas such as Squamish and False Creek to encourage spawning, but that is only a short-term solution. Creosote is a cheap wood preservative compared with concrete or steel.

In Washington state, the Department of Fish and Wildlife prohibits creosote pilings in marinas and terminals in saltwater as well as in any hydraulic project in freshwater. 

The port has the power to implement restrictions on creosote even in the absence of federal regulations and is reviewing the environmental implications along with potential alternatives and costs.

“It has to be science-based,” Brown says of any restriction. “If federal fisheries has no law against it, we have to do the research ourselves.” 

Expansion plans

We proceed eastward to Crab Park at Portside — a refuge of green on the Downside Eastside waterfront where community concerns focus on shipping giant DP World’s planned $320-million container expansion at Centerm next door. 

The port owns the industrial land, is officially proposing the expansion, and is conducting its own environmental assessment — the sort of cosy system that port opponents around the region decry as a conflict of interest that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau must address. 

Roger Emsley has worked on port-related community committees in Delta for the past decade and laments: “During that time, I have watched as the port has become more and more arrogant, less prepared to listen to community concerns, less interested in listening to alternative viewpoints on environmental matters and on a number of key issues simply refusing to address matters that are raised in and by communities that host port operations.”

In total, the port manages 16,000 hectares of water and 1,000 hectares of land.

Any expansion to Centerm would require habitat compensation, although details won’t be available until late summer.

Does industry push back in such cases? 

“In the early years there was resistance,” Brown responds. “But I’m seeing an increased awareness and I like to think people want to do the right thing. It’s part of doing business.”

Experience shows that even the best human intensions can be a poor substitute for natural habitat.

Bird life

East of Centerm stands an artificial nest platform constructed by the cement giant, Lafarge, in 2009 to benefit a pair of bald eagles nesting in a lone spindly cottonwood tree on the property.

A pair of bald eagles didn’t take to an artificial nest constructed by cement giant Lafarge.

When the cottonwood finally blew over in 2014, the eagles moved to a nest site in a fir tree in an east-side residential neighbourhood rather than take to the artificial platform.

Butler remains ever vigilant for wing beats off our vessel’s stern section. “See those scoters, all along there? Maybe 1,000 or so. They swallow the mussels then take them offshore to digest them.”

Barrows goldeneye ducks are a common visitor to Vancouver’s inner harbour area in winter. 

Our journey continues to New Brighton Park, where restoration plans are afoot for construction of a foreshore saltwater marsh for fish and birds, subtidal rocky reefs, trails and “daylighting” of Renfrew Creek.

Next door is Viterra Cascadia Terminal, where peregrine falcons feed on pigeons attracted to the grain silos; they are part of an urban success story for the raptors across North America.

MacVicar, a former high school teacher at the forefront of marine education projects, delicately guides the vessel on a flood tide against a strong easterly wind. Several pelagic cormorants resting on the bottom of the Second Narrows Bridge foundations hint at a greater story.

Butler looks skyward and reveals: “They nest in the girders under the bridge. Probably 100 to 200. They’re safe from eagles.”

Bufflehead ducks are part of the natural wonder found within Port of Vancouver. 

In the past, another 90 pairs of double-crested cormorants have been observed nesting on a transmission tower at Second Narrows. And on the north side of the inner harbour, up to an estimated 10 pairs of pigeon guillemots nest under the pier at Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver.

It’s further evidence of the resilience of nature in an unnatural world.

Pollution 

That makes the refinery the third-largest air polluter in Metro Vancouver after two cement plants: Lafarge, in Richmond, at 1,975 tonnes, and Lehigh, in Delta, at 2,280 tonnes.

The bigger concern for marine life is the threat of a major oil spill, including from a seven-fold increase to 34 tankers per month associated with Kinder Morgan’s proposed $6.8-billion twinning of its pipeline to Westridge Terminal in Burnaby. 

No one wishes for an environmental calamity, but some good can come from it.

In 2007, a Kinder Morgan pipeline ruptured in Burnaby, spewing 234,000 litres of oil into a Burnaby neighbourhood and ultimately Burrard Inlet. More than 220,000 litres of oil escaped and 70,000 litres reached Burrard Inlet.

A provincial court judge in 2011 ordered Kinder Morgan, B. Cusano Contracting Inc., and R.F. Binnie and Associates Ltd. to each pay $149,000 to the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation to help fund habitat-restoration projects in Burrard Inlet.

Several estuaries in Burrard Inlet benefited from the money, including Seymour River, Mosquito Creek, Lynn Creek and Mackay Creek. Work has included reshaping the estuaries, removing invasive plants, bringing in logs for habitat complexity, replanting native vegetation with fencing to keep out Canada geese, and erecting piles of rocks for snakes and bird nests.

Restoration work at Mackay Creek estuary in North Vancouver is designed to increase fish habitat and help marine life in industrial Burrard Inlet. 

Butler has witnessed the return of several species over the decades such as the bald eagle, trumpeter swan and peregrine falcon — once humanity stopped shooting them or poisoning them with DDT. 

He is confident Burrard Inlet can come back, too. Creating critical habitat for forage fish such as herring and sand lance and providing a pathway for them to hide from predators is a great start. 

“We know what has to be done; it’s just a matter of working away at it,” Butler concludes.

lpynn@postmedia.com

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Ryan Chapman, operations manager for the BC Wildfire Service discusses how they try to control the burn of a forest fire on Beatton Airport Road near Fort St. John.

The B.C. government has ordered a wildlife rehabilitation centre to put GPS collars on two controversial black bear cubs spared death by a conservation officer last year to find out if they get involved in human conflicts upon their release back to the wild.

The non-profit North Island Wildlife Recovery Centre, which has no experience with radio-collaring bears, is also being ordered to pay the full costs of the collars.

“They want them collared and we have to pay, so that’s fun,” Julie Mackey, the centre’s wildlife manager, said in an interview. “They’re $5,000 to $6,000 a collar, so it’s not a cheap program to take on.”

The centre welcomes public donations to help pay for the collar program on its website, niwra.org.

The Conservation Officer Service faced international criticism following the suspension of officer Bryce Casavant for refusing to kill two eight-week-old black bears cubs on July 5 near Port Hardy on northern Vancouver Island.

The mother was killed, but Casavant argued the cubs were too young to be conditioned to human food. He left the Ministry of Environment for a jobs as a natural resources officer based in Port McNeill.

Ultimately, Mackey would like to see a larger study of more radio-collared cubs over the longer term to provide more accurate information on bear movements after release, but the organization does not have the capacity to take that on.

Jordan and Athena, rescued bear cubs at about five months old.

Steve Thomson, the minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, refused to comment.

The cubs are scheduled to be released to the wild this summer or fall. The collars would transmit data on the bears’ movements by GPS and would be designed to fall off later without the need to recapture the cubs, Mackey said.

An environmental group says it is suspicious of the provincial government’s action, arguing it is unusual and could potentially leading to the animals’ destruction.

Chris Genovali, executive-director of Raincoast Conservation Foundation, said: “Our concern is that the two cubs are effectively being marked for death out of some sort of ‘institutional spite’ by the province as a reaction to the bear cubs being initially saved and all the resulting controversy (and bad publicity) the province endured.”

Genovali said he is also concerned about the North Island Wildlife Recovery Centre’s lack of expertise with collars.

Ministry official Greig Bethel confirmed it is “not common practice” for black bear cubs to be fitted with GPS collars, but that all grizzly cubs are collared before release. He said the two cubs “will be treated as any other bear would be once put back into the wild.”

Hazing is an option to killing a bear that gets into trouble with humans. “Bears are not relocated if they come into conflict with humans,” he noted.

Bethel confirmed the collars “will be sourced and paid for” by the recovery centre, and that the information provided will be emailed to a generic account that can be accessed by both the centre and ministry staff.

He said the cubs might be released as early as June, but Mackey suggested that date could be premature.

lpynn@postmedia.com

The federal government is recommending long-awaited regulations that would require all passengers and crew on commercial floatplanes to wear inflatable life vests during flights over water.

Transport Canada’s planned amendments to Canadian aviation regulations would also require mandatory training for pilots of fixed-wing commercial seaplanes on how to get out of the plane under water in the event of a crash.

The proposed regulatory changes were published last week in the Canada Gazette. Canadians have 30 days to comment before the changes are finalized.

In 2009, a Seair Seaplanes de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver crashed at Lyall Harbour off Saturna Island. Six occupants, including a doctor and her infant drowned inside the aircraft. The pilot and one other passenger escaped with serious injuries, but were without life vests and at risk of drowning.

In 2005, an MJM Air Beaver crashed near Quadra Island. Five men escaped the aircraft but are thought to have drowned. Life vests were still in their pouches above the door.

In 2011, the federal transportation safety board released its report into the Seair accident recommending the federal government require that all new and existing commercial floatplanes be fitted with regular and emergency exits that allow rapid egress and that occupants of commercial seaplanes wear a device that provides personal flotation after an emergency escape.

Bill Yearwood, regional manager of the safety board, said Monday that the federal decision is “good news” for aviation.

“Finally, after several years and some operators leading the way, passengers will have better chances of survival after exiting a sinking float-plane. While these accidents don’t happen often, when they do, people drown.”

The Vancouver Sun won a Jack Webster award for its coverage of seaplane safety, including the need for mandatory wearing of life vests, and received a national citation of merit from the Michener Awards.

Viking Air near Victoria voluntarily produced safety fixes for the Beaver that included emergency pop-out windows and door handles that are easier to open in a crash. “Transport Canada still hasn’t made these mandatory,” Yearwood noted. “A big part of survival is getting out of a sinking or burning aircraft quickly.”

In seaplane accidents on water, occupants are generally too panicked to locate and put on a life vest, typically stored under a seat. The new regulations would require occupants to wear a flotation device provided by the operator while boarding the seaplane, and while it is operated on or above water.

After the Seair crash, several smaller seaplane companies in B.C. voluntarily ordered their passengers to wear life vests, but larger operators such as Harbour Air did not.

While some pilots have expressed concern that passengers may accidentally deploy inflatable vests before leaving a sinking seaplane, Transport Canada believes such concerns can be alleviated by detailed briefings before flight.

lpynn@postmedia.com

Vancouver International Airport scared a record more than one million birds away from runways last year in a ramped-up effort to reduce the number of times airplanes hit birds.

The airport moved almost 1.1 million birds in 2015, up from 624,000 in 2014 and a five-year high of 704,000 in 2012.

“Our wildlife program is a big component of managing aviation safety,” David Bradbeer, YVR’s wildlife program specialist, said in an interview.

Much of the increase was attributed to a jump in the snow geese population to an estimated 81,000 for the shared Skagit-Fraser population, up from 64,000 in 2014. About half of those birds overwinter in the lower Fraser delta. Bradbeer said about one-quarter of the snow geese are juvenile birds which are more naive and less receptive to control efforts. 

The airport began using a five-metre AirRider 45 hovercraft last year to get into the marshes off the end of the runway. Once wildlife crews are close, they employ noisemakers to frighten the geese into moving on.

 “We were surprised how tolerant other birds were of the hovercraft,” he said. “We were able to get within 20 metres of the snow geese. That’s not what we expected to see.”

The airport also killed 212 birds for posing a threat last year — well under half the 564 killed in 2012 — including 65 snow geese, 33 mallard ducks and three short-eared owls, which were “inadvertently killed” by trained falcons sent out to chase the more common birds. 

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“In these three instances, the falcons were controlling shorebirds,” Bradbeer said. “They effectively moved them over the (perimeter) fence and unfortunately there were short-eared owls feeding right on the boundary between the foreshore and the airfield and the falcons saw that as an opportunity and attacked the owls.”

Since 2010, the airport has also captured and relocated a total of 548  raptors to the Fraser Valley. About 80 per cent of adult red-tailed hawks returned to the airport, whereas 10 to 20 per cent of the juveniles — the ones at higher risk of being hit by aircraft — returned. One banded relocated rough-legged hawk turned up in Montana. The same hawks can be repeatedly moved away from the airport.

The number of bird strikes at YVR totalled 206 in 2015, including birds as large as great blue herons, hawks and seagulls, down from 2010 in 2014 and 238 in 2012. No incidents resulted in crashes last year, although the spectacular 2009 crash of a passenger jet at New York highlights the potential dangers of bird strikes. The US Airways A320 Airbus flew into a flock of geese shortly before losing both engines and splashing down onto the Hudson River. All 155 passengers and crew survived.

lpynn@postmedia.com

Levels of two “persistent organic pollutants” in harbour seals have declined dramatically over the decades, but remain considerably higher in Washington state’s Puget Sound than in southern B.C. waters, new research shows.

“It’s a good news story in terms of contaminants,” Marie Noel, research manager with the Vancouver Aquarium, said in an interview. “When regulations are put into place it does work and makes an impact on the environment.”

The study obtained blubber samples from four-to-six-week-old seals at four sites: Hornby Island in the Strait of Georgia, Burrard Inlet near Port Moody, Smith Island in eastern Juan de Fuca Strait near the Canada-U.S. border, and Gertrude Island in southern Puget Sound near Tacoma in Washington state.

The seals were captured using boats and nets close to their haulouts. 

“It can be pretty challenging,” Noel confirmed.

Toxins such as PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls, used as industrial coolants) and PBDEs (polybrominated diphenyl ethers, used as flame retardants) bioaccumulate in the blubber and provide an indication of pollution near the top of the food chain.

The study showed that harbour seals in southern Puget Sound are four to five more times contaminated with PCBs and 1.8 times more with PBDEs than their counterparts at the other Salish Sea sites. 

South Puget Sound is not only close to major population centres, but suffers from a lack of tidal flushing action compared with the Strait of Georgia. 

PCBs in seals have declined between 1984 and 2014, reflecting their regulation in the mid-1970s, the study noted. 

PBDEs doubled every 3.1 years between 1984 and 2003, before dropping in 2009, likely linked to regulatory measures taken in North America after 2004. 

“You’ll continue to see a slow decline over time,” Noel said. “But it will take decades to get rid of it.”

Transient killer whales, which eat marine mammals such as seals, should also benefit from the declines.

Noel explained that two commercial formulations of PBDE were withdrawn from the market in 2004, while a third was phased out in 2013 with a prohibition on the production and importation of the pollutant.

While the 17,000-square-kilometre Salish Sea boasts about 53,000 harbour seals, the population remains at risk from persistent organic pollutants that can affect the immune system, making them more vulnerable to diseases, as well as to hormonal disruptions. Young seals obtain the contaminants through their mothers’ milk and from the womb.

Research has been going on since 1984 on pollutant levels in seals in the region.

lpynn@postmedia.com

Along the Peace River — More than two centuries ago, Rocky Mountain Fort bustled with activity as a North West Company fur-trading post at the edge of the world.

In the 1790s, the first European settlement in the B.C. Interior also served as a provisioning base, turning the region’s herds of elk and bison into pemmican to feed the voyageurs on their eastward canoe trips.

Today, the fort’s site exists in the construction shadow of B.C. Hydro’s 1,100-megawatt Site C dam on the Peace River near Fort St. John. The historic site and its surrounding islands and hillsides have been logged of their aspen, spruce and pine. The area, in total about seven square kilometres, crawls with hundreds of workers moving timber, building roads and setting up work camps.

Site C opponent Mark Meiers at historic Rocky Mountain Fort site that will be flooded by B.C. Hydro’s Site C dam on the Peace River.

According to Hydro’s timetable, Rocky Mountain Fort and its last wisps of national significance will be extinguished under 50 metres of water by 2024. That’s when the reservoir will be filled and B.C.’s most expensive megaproject — officially, about $8.8 billion — will be ready to produce 5,100 gigawatt hours of energy each year.

Hydro boasts the facility will support a workforce of up to 1,500 people during the eight-year construction period and power the equivalent of 450,000 homes for more than a century. As the mantra further goes: Site C will generate about 35 per cent of the energy of W.A.C. Bennett Dam, built in the 196os, with five per cent of the reservoir area. Site C will have two to three days of water storage compared with two to three years for the Williston reservoir — water that will be used three times as it goes through the powerhouses at the W. A. C Bennett Dam, the Peace Canyon Dam and then the Site C Dam.

The Site C dam will flood 83 kilometres of the main Peace River Valley extending from south of Fort St. John west towards Hudson’s Hope, plus about 35 kilometres of tributary valleys — Moberly River, Cache Creek, Halfway River, Farrell Creek, and Lynx Creek.

From the top of the north bank, about 180 metres above the river, one can seen orange fencing on the south bank that marks the precise location of the planned dam. Vast clearcuts already flank both sides of the Peace, a new steel bridge connects the two sides, and trucks stir up dust as they haul logs to local mills. There’s a main transport road alongside the river lined with rip-rap rock and a complex of accommodation buildings for workers is being installed by the ATCO Group. Several public roads leading to Site C are being upgraded at Hydro’s expense.

A protest cabin sits upstream on the north bank, next to the words “No Dam C ” written out with white stones. Protesters occupied Rocky Mountain Fort for 62 days before Hydro obtained a court order to evict them.

Construction of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam lacked the years of passionate protests that have dogged the Site C project.

“It was a different time,” Dave Conway, Hydro’s community relations manager for Site C, says during a Vancouver Sun tour of the project.

“No approval agencies, really,” added Siobhan Jackson, Hydro’s environmental and community mitigation manager.

While Site C’s reservoir footprint is much smaller than W.A.C. Bennett’s Williston reservoir, greater efforts are underway to remove timber this time around. “There were no mills to take it to (before),” Jackson noted. 

Public boat launches will allow access to the new reservoir, but Hydro feels there is no need to artificially stock it with fish. 

As the tour proceeds, mule deer are visible on the bluff above the work site, and, later, a Rocky Mountain elk dashes across the access road — evidence of the productive landscape and what stands to be lost. 

The project will flood more the 53 square kilometres of land — not just historic and aboriginal sites, but prime farmland and wildlife habitat so rich that explorer Alexander Mackenzie wrote in 1793: “The country is so crowded with animals as to have the appearance, in some places, of a stall-yard, from the state of the ground, and the quantity of dung, which is scattered over it.”

Hydro is also planning a trap-and-haul system to move fish species such as bull trout around the dam to spawning areas.

While Hydro pushes the project as green energy, its own research suggests the project will emit about 5.1 million tonnes of greenhouse gases over its lifetime — a figure the Crown corporation says compares very favourably with other renewal energy sources and far below sources such as coal and natural gas. The Site C estimate include the gases emitted by rotting vegetation in the reservoir.

“B.C. has significant unused capacity to generate more electricity from existing dams,” commented Karen Bakker, Canada Research Chair at the University of B.C., urging a closer look at solar and wind power. “Site C is not the cheapest option, if we look at the big picture.”

Work camp rising

We drive down toward the river and park outside the rows of accommodation buildings — some three storeys high, and some still under construction — linked by wooden walkways. 

ATCO has a $470-million contract to provide the housing for Site C. It includes a multi-faith centre, 100-person movie theatre, gymnasium with a running track and weight training area, along with physiotherapy, massage and hairdressing services.

A licensed lounge is in the works, with a four-drink daily maximum of beer and wine only — an acknowledgment that it is better to have the workers drink on site than drive into town. Booze is not permitted elsewhere on Site C.

Three hundred beds opened in February. That will expand to 1,200 in June and 1,600 in August.

Hydro reports 666 workers employed on the Site C project as of March, 74 per cent of them British Columbians. Construction started last July and is expected to peak in 2018. 

Darrell Holmes of Fort Nelson is working as a crew foreman with Peace River Hydro Partners, the company with the main contract to build B.C. Hydro’s Site C dam. 

Darrell Holmes of Fort Nelson has worked in mining, construction, and oil and gas, including a stint in Albania for a year and a half. He’s happy to finally land a steady job for eight years as a crew foreman, working 21, 12-hour days, followed by seven days off. “The job security is what attracted me here,” he says. 

Mona Hampel went from unemployed in Tumbler Ridge, a 90-minute drive away, to safety adviser on Site C. “I’d been hearing about Site C for a long time and thought it would be a great project to be part of,” she said. “This will take me into retirement. It’s perfect.”

Both are employed by Peace River Hydro Partners, the company awarded a $1.75 billion contract — largest on the project — in November 2015 for construction of the earth fill dam along with two diversion tunnels and a huge concrete foundation for the generating station and spillways.

The consortium includes Spanish ACCIONA Infrastructure Canada Inc., Calgary-based Petrowest Corporation and Samsung C&T Canada Ltd., owned by the South Korean multinational.

Jim Schilling, aboriginal inclusion coordinator with the partnership, recalls his father logging the reservoir lands during construction of the W.A.C. Bennett dam. “I’d flip pancakes for the crew,” he said. “I was nine year old, which dates me a little bit.”

Timber felled for Site C dam construction on the Peace River is hauled to local mills along a new riverside road. 

The Peace Canyon dam was built in 1980 downstream of the W.A.C. Bennett dam, thus making Site C the third in the series on the Peace and B.C.’s last large dam — if a promise by former Premier Gordon Campbell holds true.

The downturn in the oilpatch has made it easier to find workers for Site C. “The original concept was that there would be a labour shortage,” commented Schilling. “Well, it couldn’t be further from the truth. There are so many people looking for work.”

Thousands of workers are applying for jobs, with only a few jobs such as roller-compacting concrete requiring outside expertise. “It’s very specialized,” Schilling said of roller-compacting. “There are only 14 people in the world that have the capacity to do that job.”

Contractors are told by Hydro to give work to locals based on qualifications, including to First Nations both at the individual level and through sub-contracts. The partnership has already reached four sub-contracts with First Nations for jobs such as site safety and first aid.

ATCO reports 11 subcontracts with First Nations to date, including Saulteau, McLeod Lake, Doig River, and Blueberry River, ranging from security to to snow removal to waste disposal.

Even among First Nations officially opposed to Site C such as West Moberly and Prophet River, individual band members are seeking employment and are eligible for apprenticeship training.

“I’m born and raised here and I really hope that they get the political will to take advantage of this opportunity right in their backyard,” Schilling said.

The partnership has also reached labour agreements with the Christian Labour Association of Canada, mostly equipment operators, and with the Construction Maintenance and Allied Workers Union. Union president Jan Noster said his journeymen carpenters earn about $38 an hour plus benefits. “I’m just glad we’re there, especially with the recession in Fort McMurray. It’s not a concessionary agreement.”

Noster says the biggest pay day is yet to come — 700,000 cubic metres of concrete-form work associated with the dam’s powerhouse. Hydro will award that contract later this year, he said.

“Some of the biggest concrete every poured in B.C.” he said. “If we were boxing, we’ve had the first and second undercard, and the main event is the powerhouse.”

Dam politics

Site C is very much a political project pushed by the Liberal government. While a federal joint review panel approved the dam with conditions in 2014, its recommendation that the B.C. Utilities Commission look at the issue of power need was immediately rejected by the province.

The commission had rejected Site C in 1983, recommending that other energy sources be studied and ruling that projected electricity demands did not justify the project. Critics today claim the project makes no environmental or economic sense and is simply a wasteful gift from the Liberal administration to its big-industry backers.

The New Democrats’ opposition to the project despite the party’s long-held union ties could also have political consequences.

“The NDP’s position is stupid,” Noster argued. “I think it was the working-class, blue-collar vote that cost them the last election — no pipelines, no fracking, no dams — and I’m not optimistic about the (2017 election) one coming up.”   

The mayor of Fort St. John is known to be opinionated, but on the topic of the Site C adopts a more balanced tone.

“It’s a divisive topic,” explains Lori Ackerman, who earlier this month lost the provincial Liberal nomination for Peace River North. “BC Hydro has two dams already on this river. But it’s also a valley we’re losing and it has a huge emotional attachment to the people who live here.”

The failure of the province and hydro to publicly recognize what is being lost by the dam and the failure to fully canvass all alternatives has only fuelled the debate, she argued.

Fort St. John and B.C. Hydro signed a “community measures agreement” in April. It provides, in part, about $1 million a year during construction, $100,000 a year to community non-profits, funding for an additional police officer, and a resolution process for disputes over construction-related effects that may arise during construction.

“It’s precedent-setting for a municipality,” Ackerman said. “It’s legally binding. There’s a lot of unknowns moving forward.”

Nurse Lorri Toop and paramedic Stephen Arsenault staff the medical clinic at the construction camp for the Site C dam on the Peace River. 

To ease medical demands on Fort St. John, Hydro has created a medical clinic employing a nurse and paramedic with advanced training on the project site. Lorri Toop has a master’s degree and access to a physician’s advice as needed, but said: “I can prescribe medications, do physical exams, order lab tests. It’s an advanced role.”

Ailments incurred both on and off the job are treated, though contractors have their own site industrial first-aid staff to handle minor injuries. “We won’t turn them away,” she noted.

To further reduce demands on city services, the construction site plans to draw and treat water from the Peace River and operate its own waste-disposal system with lagoons by June. “We decided it was a reasonable approach to be self-sufficient,” Jackson said.

Crews are also on the lookout for the uncovering of archaeological sites and old bones during construction, given the history of human occupation as well as dinosaurs in the region. One of the more interesting discoveries to date is the leg bone, tooth and cranial fragments of a Pleistocene horse, perhaps 30,000 years old. More detailed dating is underway.

The find was not far from continuing construction of a road across a ravine that came under scrutiny of the province’s Environmental Assessment Office. A senior compliance officer issued Hydro with an enforcement order in April for the Morgan Construction site to control existing and potential erosion and sediment run-off from slopes, piles, ditches, roads and bare soil. 

“They were concerned about the 100-year melt,” said company safety manager Doug Morgan. “But we never saw it.” Looking down into the ravine, he said crews are grouting an “eight-foot culvert, big enough to drive a Volkswagen through.” The project started in October and should take another six to eight weeks.

For now, the Site C construction site is closed to the public. A north-bank viewpoint just a 10-minute drive south of Fort St. John will open in a few months.

lpynn@postmedia.com

Site C: Making power by 2024