Cortes Currents

Manda Aufochs Gillespie/ Folk U - On Friday August 25th, Basil performed the ninth concert in the Friday Market Live Music Series. An island singer-songwriter, their music was beautiful and heartfelt. Manda Aufochs Gillespie hosted the concert live on Folk U Radio.

The series was sponsored by the Cortes Island Community Foundation.

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

Greg Osoba comes to Folk U Radio by Cortes Currents (https://cortescurrents.ca/)

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Paul Muskee has been working for QXMC for close to 15 years and the last decade of that has been with Klahoose Aquaculture.

“I feel like my life has led me this way. When I was younger, I did work in aquaculture and I did work in forestry. I was also a mining technologist for a bunch of years, but I grew up  around Powell River, Lund and Desolation Sound.  Running boats has always been part of what I've done. I've loved working for Klahoose. They've been a great employer and I really like the people I've gotten to work with,” he explained.  

“I started working in their forestry department. I was out in the bush, helping to engineer blocks, plan roads and timber cruising. When the Jimmy Creek project happened,  the development corporation picked up a bunch of pieces of that, running the 220 man camp, fuel supply for the project, barging,  and that's when I got pulled out of the bush and into the office.” 

“I've been helping to organize things ever since.” 

“I was also involved with our first tourism initiative, which was grizzly bear tours in Toba Inlet which is now grown into the Klahoose Wilderness Resort and Gorge Harbour.”


CC: When did QXMC come into being?

PM: “It was before my time. I see the incorporation date, 2007. Cortes Cortes It was probably set up under Chief Ken Brown. The Development Corp, I believe, would have been Klahoose's initial engagement with the power companies in Toba Inlet.” 


CC: How did you become involved in Klahoose Aquaculture?


PM: “Before my time, Klahoose had already embarked on acquiring aquaculture tenures and geoduck aquaculture, which was actually quite an innovative step because  geoduck aquaculture is quite a new thing, still is. There's a lot of unknowns to it, and that was one of the things that I was asked to continue pursuing once I was working in administration.”

“Geoducks take about seven years to grow. A lot of things that can happen in that time. It's all underwater aquaculture, so you can't closely monitor your stock on a day to day basis.”

“We tried to draw on the advice and the knowledge of others that have done it. We tried to improve that and we still don't know exactly how successful we'll be because those plantings are still on the bottom from six years ago. We tried to give the seed every chance at health, so we boosted their growth inside Squirrel Cove and baskets of sand before planting them out in the deep.”

CC: Where is the principal market? 

  

PM: China: when we harvest geoducks, sometimes the divers will finish diving around two in the afternoon, and by that night those geoducks will already be on a plane to China. Everything has to move quickly. It takes a lot of coordination to meet boats, to meet trucks, to meet processing plants, and out to the airport. Ideally they can drop the geoducks in a live tank”

More about clams, oysters, seaweed and geoducks in podcast

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The Cortes Community Economic Development Association (CCEDA) is hosting an in-person community discussion with Cortes Island’s small businesses in the Pioneer Room at Mansons Hall on Thursday Sept 14, 2023. 

This is the first in a series of 6 ‘Conversation Cafes’ meant to update Cortes Island’s Local Economic Action Plan (LEAP) in an inexpensive way. 


 “Our Local Economic Action Plan is five years out of date,” said Kate Maddigan, CCEDA’s Economic Development Officer.  


She explained how the LEAP report has already brought millions of dollars of funding into the Cortes Island economy and been behind many of the major community initiatives unfolding around us.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - (The second is a series of interviews with Ann Mortifee, click here to access part one.)

Ann Mortifee seemed to be on the verge of a breakthrough few artists even dream of, when she left the music industry in 1975. EMI Records had just produced her second album and set up a world tour.

Yet Ann’s inner voice clearly stated, “if you go down this path, you will not fulfill your destiny.”

She resisted at first, but finally told her music director, “I'm leaving music, and I'm going on a pilgrimage.”

AM: “They could have sued me because I had this contract with them, a huge contract. And they let me out of it. Then I went into ( this) A depression. Like, what was that about? Am I afraid of BEING (getting) successful? Why did I do that?”

She would later refer to the next three years as one of the most incredible periods of her life.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Sean Nightingale, from Wild Cortes, will be giving a presentation about insects, at the Cortes Island Regional Library from 5:30 to 7;00 tonight.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The first in a series on interviews:

Ann Mortifee is probably the most famous musician on Cortes Island, which is more of a compliment than it sounds like because there are a lot of talented musicians on Cortes. However from the start of our interview, it was apparent this story was about a lot more than singing. I had this bizarre feeling to lead with the question, ‘When did you start becoming Ann Mortifee?’ 

Her answer came out of the memories of a 4-years-old girl.


AM:  “It happened maybe a hundred times in my childhood. I had the same dream. I'd be standing somewhere looking into a bedroom and there'd be someone lying in the bed. I'd go, ‘Oh no, I'm starting to dream of her again.’ Then I would get this anxious feeling, ‘I'm going to get stuck there in the dream and I'm going to believe it's real.’ This dream gets more and more upsetting to me. I can feel myself starting to fall asleep and that I'm in a dream.” 


“Then I fall asleep and I wake up in the body of a young girl who lives in Zululand. I looked down at my hands and I said, ‘these are not my hands, these are her hands.’ Then I couldn't remember who I was. I keep thinking, who am I when I'm not dreaming I'm Ann?”  


"That was the template for my life, who am I when I'm not dreaming I'm Ann?” 

The podcast above deals with her childhood, and early career until leaving music on a 3 year pilgrimage

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - QXMC, the Klahoose First Nation development company, is looking for a new General Manager.

 “We’ve retained a search company that has a great track record of looking for candidates of this type of size. In the past, we’ve used companies like Boyden that sort of do searches for Fortune 500 companies, and that’s not what we’re looking for,” explained Ron Buchhorn, Chairman of the QXMC Board.

“We’re looking for people who can run a diverse business. We’re probably talking about $140 million in revenue. It’s a big business mainly on the logging side, which is where most of the revenue comes from, but it’s diverse in terms of logging, aquaculture, resorts, ecotours, our bear touring operations, and having a sensitivity to our owners and understanding their goals and how they’d like the company operated.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - It has been almost two years since a parcel of land the Klahoose acquired in Squirrel Cove was added to the reserve. Shortly after that, the  Klahoose development corporation (QXMC) discussed plans to develop 30-40 campsites. Then there was talk of a gas station. 

All of these ideas became much more real about a month ago, when a contractor started falling trees. Now there is a cleared area and freshly drilled well on the part of the property west of Squirrel Cove Road. Across the road, to the east, the path of a future driveway is laid out as a u-shaped clearing. There is also a second well.  

QXMC Chair Ron Buchhorn explained, “We are currently under contract to a design builder by the name of VisionQuest, which will manage the engineering and construction of a Chevron station and  a full service store that will be supplied by Co-op. Because of the Chevron branding on the service station, it won't be branded a Co-op store, it'll be branded the Klahoose Market or something like that.” 


“Across the road from the store and gas station is an RV site. The road has been cleared into that site. We'll be doing a really nice job of keeping whatever trees we can, keeping the RV paths nicely treed and forested. So it'll be a very park-like setting.”

There will be RV spots.

“Along the waterfront where we can, we'll be building some nice cottages. We're going to do a really nice design to see how many cottages we can actually put in because the elevation drop in some areas will not support a cottage on the waterfront. We'll have to look at the actual topography and decide how many cottages we can actually build along the waterfront. But I would say, from just my cursory look at the property, we should be able to get six to eight cottages along the waterfront there.” 

“We're going to do a really nice design to see how many cottages we can actually put in because the elevation drop in some areas will not support a cottage on the waterfront. We'll have to look at the actual topography and decide how many cottages we can actually build along the waterfront. But I would say, from just my cursory look at the property, we should be able to get six to eight cottages along the waterfront there.” 

CC: “When are any of the parts of this expected to open? 

RB: Well, the store and gas bar: we have been told the design will be about four months and the build will be around eight months. So we're hoping for a grand opening sometime next September or October for the Chevron gas station and the Co-op store.” 

“We will take our time on the RV Park. It probably would be for the following season, the 2025 season.” 

“This should be a first class facility. It'll obviously service the First Nation reserve with a decent store and gas facility, and then allow visitors to Cortes to experience a really nice RV park.” 

There may be an additional component once QXMC builds the new restaurant in Gorge Harbor.

RB: “I’m told there's a market for the food truck down at Squirrel Cove,  if we have the RV park down there. Kathy Francis tells me that there will be a market for a food truck in that area.”

Louis Belcourt/ CKTZ News - Cortes Island's Manson's Hall will be host to a live production of "The Great Simplification" podcast this Monday evening for the first time.

"The Great Simplification" is the #1 earth science podcast on Apple podcasts in Canada, the United States and other countries. The podcast has been producing episodes since early 2021. Guests are from a wide range of scientists, leaders, activists and thinkers and conversation topics span "human behavior, monetary/economic systems, energy, ecology, geopolitics and the environment."

Nate Hagens, the host of the podcast, is "trying to educate and inspire broader society to meet the future halfway on the situation of our economy, our environment, and our society in the next decade or so."

He holds a masters degree in finance from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont, and uses his learnings to try and "explore the systems science underpinning the human predicament."

Hagens will give an overview of his perspective on the global situation, and discuss with attendees "how special Cortes Island is" and the opportunity it has for change.

"In the face of what society is facing, and what an amazing opportunity you have with a small sized island with a 1,000 or so population, to change the initial conditions of your future. You're not like Los Angeles or Toronto in your constraints."

The show will be at 7 p.m. on Monday evening, Sept. 4.