Cortes Currents

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - A Lund based company has begun working with The Harbour Authority Association of BC on Spill Response Training. Their first training course with the BC Harbour Authority will start in Tofino on Tuesday, March 29, 2022. Successive training sessions will be on a case by case basis.

Waterways Environmental is a 100% First Nations owned company that already offers spill response, swiftwater spill response, marine hazmat response, booming, on-water flammable liquid specialists, submerged vessel/vehicle recovery, shoreline clean-up,  wildlife monitoring training and first and cpr training, as well as safety consultations. 

They are also under the umbrella of Access Point Marine Group, which is based at Finn Bay, Lund..

“I just obtained an opportunity with the BC Harbour Authority to offer spill response training for some of the harbour masters and their employees, as well as teams from Nation operated harbours along the BC Coastline . The objective is to properly contain spills until the professionals arrive,” explained Sue Bossley.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Take four

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents- According to Luke, the pilot, there are usually sightseers on board when CorilAir delivers the mail in the Discovery Islands.

A man from Campbell River and his sister-in-law from Ontario were on the plane when it picked me up at Cortes Bay, on Wednesday, March 23rd. Neither of them had made the trip before, and they were busy taking pictures throughout the trip. So was I. Everything looks much different when you are sitting hundreds of feet up in the air!

I also took a recorder along and have an excellent recording of the plane’s engine, but abandoned the attempt to conduct any interviews after listening to the thunderous roar that a slight breeze can make.

That was in Refuge Cove, where the only person we saw was a local resident named Dave. He said that the general store, café and all the shops are closed during the winter months. The odd boat will fill up at the fuel dock once or twice a month.

This will change when the tourist season begins.

There are about a dozen year-round residents, but in the warmer months the population swells to about 20 families with hundreds of boaters stopping by every day.  

“Everything goes crazy in the summer,” said Dave, who regaled us with tales of long line-ups and impatient customers.

We donned our face masks and climbed back into the ‘de Havilland Beaver’ for the flight to Read Island. Squirrel Cove, the Klahoose village and ‘Secret Cove’ spread out below us. There was a sailboat anchored in Von Donop Inlet and a dock-like floating aquaculture bed near the mouth.

Crossing over Sutil Channel, we observed our first clearcuts on Read Island and neighbouring Quadra.

The scenery throughout this area is still spectacular.

The postmistress met us at the dock in Surge Narrows, on Read Island. According to Canadian Stamp News, this floating post office also serves

Maurelle, Sonora and Rendezvous Islands. In addition to the post office, the postmaster sells artwork, t-shirts and has two shelves of used books that are free for the taking.

There are about 65 full time residents on Read island and the postmistress said there are around 50% more people during the summer.

As there is no local store, bulk grocery purchases are made at Save On Food in Campbell River every two weeks and delivered by water taxi.

We flew north over the Octopus Islands and through the ‘Hole in the Wall” that separates Sonora and Maurelle Islands.

One of the headlines on the Sonora Island Resort’s homepage is ‘the ultimate in Wilderness Luxury.” There are blocks of vacant condos, houses and recreation facilities that could easily have been transported from Whistler. We circled around this ‘village’ to where the 68’ foot long charter vessel Columbia III (with 6 staterooms) lay at anchor.

Across the waters, Big Bay on Stuart Island is another example of the degree to which the local economy depends on tourism. According to the postmistress, there are a dozen full time residents, but the population grows to a thousand during the warmer months. Of that dozen that live on Stuart year round, she and her husband run the store and the rest are caretakers. CorilAir brought a shipment of swag for the summer. Aside from that, she said most of her stock currently consists of liqueur!

We picked up another passenger at Big Bay. He was a French landscaper who had just finished his ten day work shift and was about to start his ten days off. A camper was waiting in Campbell River. He likes to fish and mostly explores northern Vancouver Island during his days off, but has some friends in Vancouver and occasionally visits Victoria.

Our last official stop was Blind Channel on West Thurlow Island, where the Richter family has owned and operated a resort since 1970. Their website boasts ‘delicious food, creative artwork, and outstanding customer service.’

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The ‘aha moment’ for Sue Bossley arrived last Fall. Her employers, the Access Point Marine Transportation Group, started a water taxi service between Lund and Cortes Island. They had just bridged the final gap in a what was now a continuous loop running through Powell River, Cortes Island and Campbell River. The North Salish Cycle Route was born.

“You can start anywhere actually. People from Powell River can ride up to Lund and catch our Cortes water taxi across the desolation sound into Cortes Bay. Then from Cortes Bay, they can ride all around Cortes and then take the ferry over to Quadra and go to Campbell River, ride along the Oceanside route back to Comox and then back on the ferry again,” she said. “The whole area has really just been a huge community. We all have so much in common and I just thought that with everything that's happening right now and fuel prices high as well - how awesome to be able to just go for like a wonderful little biking holiday in our own neighbourhood!”

While some people may make the trek relatively quickly as possible, others may choose to spend a week or so checking out communities along the route.

Bossley won’t make the trip herself until April, but has seen posts on bikepacking.com and Facebook that refer to this as ‘the dream trip.’

She has been working with Sunshine Coast Tourism, Tourism Powell River and Tourism Vancouver Island to promote the route.

“On the sunshine coast, we have the Sunshine Coast Bike Route and in Campbell River they have the Greenways Route. All it does is just let cyclists know that they're welcome here,” explained Bosley.

She set up the North Salish Cycle Community Facebook Page before heading off for the Vancouver Outdoor Adventure Show earlier this month.

“I just encourage cyclists to use it as their own. They can ask each other questions, post their favourite photos, post their favourite stops along the way, and that kind of thing,” said Bosley. “It's really just a community page just the same way that you see a community page for the Sunshine Coast Trail or the Sarah Point Dropoff. People have lots of questions that are doing these types of things.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The Our Heart Learning project is offering offering four learning opportunities to explore reconciliation, anti-racism and building a healthy community in Campbell River.

The first workshop is a virtual event facilitated by Mary Catherine Williams on Thursday March 24th. She described it as a journey of reconciliation for nonprofits.

This will be followed by a series of workshops about responding to racist incidents.

Finally Kathy Camilleri will be holding an in-person, or virtual, event about the building bridges to understanding.

“All the workshops are free and people can register online and they can do that through event. We have space in all our workshops. Everyone is welcome,” explained Williams, who is both an organizer of the project and Executive Director of Volunteer Campbell River.

“This is a heart journey and that's why the project is called Q̓aq̓uƛ̓aʔinē sa Noqe , which is the Laich Kwil Tach words for ‘learning in your heart’ or ‘heart and learning.’ And that to me is the essence of this is that we need to begin to understand from a heart perspective, from an emotional perspective, not a head's perspective necessarily, a way to move forward together, to be safe and healthy in our communities. It is about changing our ways of thinking and knowing on both sides.”

Mary Ruth Snyder, Executive Director of the Campbell River & District Chamber of Commerce, said, “Canada as a country came to an abrupt halt last spring with the news of the discovery of children's graves at former residential schools. I think for many Canadians while they may have suspected, that was the case, they didn't know for sure and it is easily set aside as hearsay. When it became abundantly clear that it was in fact true at not just one, but several locations across the country. I think the reality of the nations experience over the last 150 years came in to focus for those of us who are not first nations. The only way for us to move forward as a society holistically is to acknowledge what happened, to listen to those who are able to share their stories, acknowledge their truths, and only then can we move forward with the first nations towards reconciliation? These workshops will assist in that process.”

Manda Aufochs Gillespie/ Folk U - Wondering what the deal is with this year’s BC Assessments… what does it mean to get a high assessment? How does it relate to the taxes you pay? Why can one community have so much variation? When and how can you contest your assessment. Bill Dawson of BC Assessment joins host Manda Aufochs Gillespie to answer all these questions and more live this Friday at 1 p.m. on 89.5FM or livestream from cortesradio.ca.

Stay tuned because after Roy Hales from Cortes Currents has a feature on understanding where our Cortes Island taxes go.

Folk U Radio is taking old school viral every Friday at 1 and Mondays at 6:30 @CKTZ89.5FM or livestreamed at cortesradio.ca. Find repeats anytime at www.folku.ca/podcasts.

Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents -Three months ago, Cortes Currents published a story about some old growth trees cut down in one of Quadra Island’s woodlots. It almost immediately became apparent that some of the information I had been given me was incorrect and there was more to the story. So I published a retraction. As the site was buried under two feet of snow, the woodlot licensees invited me to examine the site myself in the Spring. That was how I came to visit woodlot 2031 on Saturday, March 19, 2022.

I decided to not name my sources for this story, but they well known on Quadra and easy to identify.

The license holders have been in the industry since the 1980s and started actively logging Woodlot 2031 in 2014.

“Our dream is to manage this land base, all the resource values for the long term, and to be able to pass along a legacy for our children or for somebody else in the future,” the male licensee said. “We have harvest plans that take us out to 2070. They're rough because they're only map exercises. But by 2070. so another 50 years from now, we only account for about 35% of the total land base on this forest.”

(Their plans call for what appears to be roughly a 150-year-harvest rotation - my calculation, not the licensees - on the part of their land that is to be logged.)

In addition, they set aside ‘all of the stands that were identified as old growth’ and added adjoining second growth trees to the retention area.

This will eventually all be old growth.

“As we go forward, we also plan to add more in terms of long term retention in riparians and other areas too,” he said.

There are also isolated old growth trees scattered throughout their cutblocks.

“We are targeting the harvest of the second growth, but there are places where the road location interferes with individual trees, or worker safety would be compromised if we left all of the old growth trees,” he said. “We have removed a small number. The total to date is about 2% by volume of the total number of trees that we've taken since 2014, so over the past eight years. It's a very small percentage of our overall harvest. We leave probably two-thirds to three quarters of the old growth trees standing either in or adjacent to the harvest areas. So the vast majority of those that we encounter with our harvesting are being left.”

He directed my attention to some of the old growth standing just outside the cutblock. These were not the massive cathedral like trees most of us think of when we hear the words ‘old growth.’ Some were simply dead spars. I remember some healthy trees, but do not see them in my photographs. Lastly there were what I am going to call mangled trees. In one case the top was missing. Many trees were missing their lower branches. In one case the license owner told me that if we were closer to what appeared to be a distant spar, some living branches would be visible.

He confirmed that some of the old growth were healthy and also made a reference to the fact that all the old growth in this area were survivors of Quadra Island’s great fire of 1925.

Last January, someone informed Cortes Currents that he found stumps on woodlot 2031 with rings indicating ages between 350 and over 500 years.

The licensee showed Cortes Currents two of those old growth stumps, in a cutblock from 2019.

The photographs above were taken from one of those stumps. Note the wood decay in both pictures. Cortes Currents pulled a chunk of decomposing wood from the side of the stump and placed it in the lower right hand corner of the lower image.

“Those two old growth were close to where the road was built and they were close to the work area that the loggers were processing and loading wood. They determined, based on what they could see of the trees, that they would be unsafe to leave in the long term. They took them because they represented a safety hazard” said the licensee.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Prior to embarking upon a literary career, in 1985, Ray Grigg taught English, literary history, fine arts and comparative world religions in British Columbia’s High School system. Since then, he has written a long list of books on Taoism, Zen and environmental issues. Grigg was also the author of a column called ‘Shades of Green,’ which ran in the Campbell River Courier-Islander for 15 years. A little over half a year ago, he started writing a series of articles called ‘the Quadra Project.’

“What I'm trying to do is revision the way in which we understand forestry taking place on Quadra Island. We have to move outside the notion of annual allowable cut to ecological restoration and also carbon sequestration,” explained Grigg. “This has been one of the primary recommendations of the old growth strategic review panel by Merkel and Gorley who were charged with the responsibility of redesigning what forestry should be like in British Columbia. That was in 2019.”

Grigg blames the subsequent protests at Fairy Creek on BC Government’s failure to honour its promise to implement this report.

He says the corporatization of logging has led to the decimation of the forest industry and gutted mills throughout the province.

Logs from Quadra Island, for example, are not processed on Quadra, but exported to foreign markets in Japan, China, Taiwan, the United States etc.

“The other, I think more pressing issue, is that we are in the middle of the six major species extinction in the history of the planet and we are also confronting an ecological climate crisis,” said Grigg. “What we need to do is we need to think in terms of carbon sequestration, and that is the greatest positive contribution that Quadra Island could make, and I think Cortes Island and many communities in British Columbia, towards solving the carbon climate crisis. We need to change our whole way of understanding how forests work.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Regional Director Noba Anderson unveiled some new information about TELUS's proposed Cortes Island cell phone tower in a report she gave the SRD Board on Wednesday March 16th, 2022.

Anderson reported on her own communications the Tla’amin Nation and mentions CityWest also reaching out to that nation.

TELUS appears to have aborted the proposed tower projects in Squirrel Cove and is instead putting micro cells on telephone poles.

However the telecommunication’s giant may still approach the SRD about a tower in Gorge Harbour.

Only two of the more than 140 corespondents she is aware of were in favour of cell towers, which may speak more to the lack of a public forum for this project than the number of people actually opposed to cell towers.

Cortes Currents was hoping to delay the broadcast of this story until the SRD released the audio of that board meeting, but this has not occurred in time for today’s deadline and the next deadline for radio is Monday.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents -Cortes Island Air was based in Gorge Harbour in the 1990s. That was before Richard Godfrey sold the company to Mike Farrel in 2000. Farrel relocated to Campbell River, but preserved the company’s origins in its new name. CorilAIr is short for Cortes Island Airlines.

While the airline now flys out of Campbell River, it still serves Cortes.

Operations Manager Shannon Quinn explained, “Cortes Bay is our primary location for pickup and drop offs, maybe three times in one day. Gorge Harbour would be the second, we do a little bit with Mansons Landing, but not as much with Squirrel Cove as we have in the past.”

Later that morning, Farrel confirmed that the two or three flights coming into Squirrel Cove every year are probably CorilAir.

He added that most of the planes seen flying around Cortes are probably theirs.

“There's a lot of different companies in the summer months that come and go. In the winter time, it's probably us. Of course, if they're doing something you don't like, or making a lot of noise, it's not us,” he quipped.

The Klahoose Wilderness Resort was added to the list of destinations last summer, with customers flying in from Campbell River, Vancouver and Cortes Island.

CorilAIr is now based on the Spit in Campbell River.

They have four airplanes: two cessnas that carry up to three passengers and two Beavers that can carry six.

CorilAir carries the mail to Refuge Cove on West Redonda Island, Surge Narrows on Read Island and Big Bay on Stuart Island on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Those last two days they also service Blind Channel on West Thurlow Island.

From mid May until late September or early October, they have scheduled local flights out of Campbell River. (9:30 AM, 12:30 PM and 5:00 PM).

“We drop people off on the Discovery Islands, Desolation Sound and pick up anybody that needs to be picked up and return back to Campbell River,” said Quinn. “During July and August, we offer a Vancouver scheduled service out of Campbell River, which services the Islands and Desolation Sound, to take people back and forth to Vancouver.”

They set out from Campbell River at noon, pick up any passengers in the Discovery Islands and then proceed south to Vancouver airport in Richmond. The return flight leaves Vancouver at 4:00 PM and, after dropping off any island passengers, ends up at Campbell River.

Though CorilAir services most of the Discovery Islands, fights to Quadra are less frequent. Most of the traffic uses the ferry. However they do pick up and drop people off on the Vancouver run, often at April Point, and they sometimes do boat to plane transfers at Heriot Bay.

In addition to scheduled flights, people sometimes charter out an aircraft. This can be more economically viable for groups. In the podcast, Quinn mentions of Cortes family of four who saved a couple of hundred dollars by chartering an aircraft on the return trip from the Sonora Resort.

(There is a lot more detail about pricing and destinations in the podcast.)