Cortes Currents

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Rex Weyler, one of the principle organizers, emailed Cortes Currents a list of the15 acts performing at this year’s Lovefest. A number of local favourites are in the line-up.

The festival will be opened by the Klahoose First Nation and Brenda Hanson is among the performers. 

Singer/songwriters Jemma Hicken, Jessie Roy and Sachika will be onstage. So will Scotty & Shelly, and the innovative professional multi-instrumentalist Michael Keith. 

Emerging poet/songwriter Josephine Simpson grew up on Cortes Island. As did Jack Weyler, from the Victoria band ‘And So Say All of Us.’

Heather Wolfe frequently visits Cortes and the popular folk-roots quartet Willow come from Quadra Island. 

There’s also an impressive line-up of acts from off island: 


Adonis Puentes was one of the nominees for ‘World Music Album Of The Year’ at the 2014 Juno Awards

Pierre Schryer and Adam Dobres whose fiddle & guitar were such a hit at last year’s Love Fest

Wylie Ferguson from Nanaimo, who just had a composition accepted by the Vancouver Symphony

Marianne Grittani, whose musical roots go back to emerging folk music of the late 60s and the 70s.

BC musician and story-teller Hazel Lennox

the Unfaithful Servants’ from Victoria

The Festival runs from 11 AM to 9 or 9:30 PM at Linnaea Farm on Saturday August 12. 

An adult ticket is $40 at one of the Cortes Island stores: - the Natural Food co-op, Cortes Market, Squirrel Cove General Store, Gorge Marina store, or Mansons Friday Market. It’s $45 at the gate. 

Youth under 18 get in for $30 and the family rate is $80.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Michael Keith was ‘blown away’ when he visited Hornby Island twenty years ago.

“I was like, ‘Wow, imagine living in a place like that.’ I remember going back to Toronto and telling my friends, ‘they don't even lock their doors there. It's incredible!’”

He was enamoured by the spectacular seascapes at Tofino, when he played there a few years later. 

Keith went through a divorce, sold his house, and then hooked up with a professor at the University of Toronto.  

“My new partner who I've been with for 10 years,  introduced me to Cortes because she would come here for getaways from Toronto. I was gigging two or three times a week, and teaching in Toronto. She wanted to move here. I came, checked it out and just fell in love with the land. We were fortunate enough to get a tiny little place.”

“I felt kind of quasi-retired when I came here because of a few health problems. Part of the reason coming here was it would just be good for me, physically and mentally. Same with my partner. I feel blessed that I was able to do that.” 


“It's a big change, as you can imagine, but I’ve done quite well. In the six years I've been here, I have really felt welcomed by the community. I'm sure it's added years to my life being here and I feel reinvigorated.”


“Some of the summers in the past six years, I've made more money than I did in Toronto for some entire years. I was playing six or seven times every summer at the Gorge and it was a really good paying thing. I miss that.”

He both teaches and sells music online.

“I also will go play for people that hire me. There's not a lot of people like myself that have done it professionally. There's a few like Rick Bockner. There's some of what I call the weekend warrior types here that get together and play the Eagles. I'll play a wedding doing Van Morrison or some stuff that really isn't me, but I can do that. I don't say no too much.”

“Just before the pandemic, I was set to relaunch my career. Then the pandemic happened. Both my parents passed away. I had a cancer diagnosis and it was one thing after another, but I'm doing well now, with a pretty good bill of health,  just monitoring stuff. I had a kidney removed last year, probably not the stuff that people want to read about, but these are just things of life.”

“I’m just starting to get reestablished again.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Nur Michael Keith has been living on Cortes Island for the past 6 years, but has been a professional musician for most of his 56 years. 


In the beginning of a two part series, he talks a little about his earlier life, inspirations and we listen to three of his songs. 


At one point during our interview I asked about his first name, ‘Nur.’ 


Michael explained, “It was something I gave myself. 'Michael' is from my birth parents, 'Keith' is from my adoptive parents and 'Nur' I gave myself. I sometimes go by Nur Michael Keith.”


“‘Nur’ is an Arabic name that means ‘light’ and one of my biggest inspirations on my journey musically and spiritually was from a man named Nur Ali Elahi.”


“He is mostly known as Ostad Elahi, and he passed away in the early 70s. He was a spiritual figure, but he played an instrument that I've studied from Iran called the tambour, it's a lute with two or three strings. He never performed publically. He just played at home. He was a judge, but his family recorded him without his knowledge. Fifty years after his passing, they started to slowly release some of these recordings.” 


“I was so moved by the brilliance of just a man and a three stringed lute. It was really life changing for me. A few years ago, as I started to feel a transformation of myself spiritually after a lot of difficult things, I decided, as a tribute to him and to inspire myself - someone who's struggled with a lot of anxiety and self doubt for decades - I gave myself the name Nur.’”

“It’s confused a lot of people here. They have asked me, 'What the heck is it all about?' I debated for so long if I should use that, but, it  felt like an important thing for me jnot to attract attention, but more to inspire myself  to explore and move in and allow myself to grow and change.”


“Some people asked if I was Muslim. I'm not a Muslim, but I'm a big fan of Sufism and also of Advaita Vedanta, a non dualist thought from India.  So many words and things, but they all go to the same thing.”


Michael said he comes from a ‘total unmusical family, being an adopted guy. It was the hobby that everyone wished would go away, and it still hasn’t.”


MK: “I was very much into heavy rock when I was younger. I  probably started playing because of Kiss, which is odd to me,  but not long after  I started listening to Johnny Winter,  John McLaughlin, jazz and blues people.” 


“In my early twenties, I knew I wanted to do it full time. I was really into the blues and then realized I needed to try to start singing because that was the only way I was going to be able to be independent and not have to worry about a band. In Toronto, where I'm from, I had  a bit of  a name and a following as  a blues rock guitar player for a while in my late twenties.”

“Carlos Del Junco is a pretty famous harmonica player, a virtuoso,  jazz and blues, and I toured with him, as his guitarist, for many years in the 90s.” 


“Then I spent a period playing free jazz in the early 2000s and toured in Europe and Asia with people doing  very avant garde stuff, but there is a scene for it worldwide. It's usually just other practitioners of that music going to see it.  I was very, very fortunate  and I even played in Venice, which was still one of my favorite experiences. Going to a gig in the little boat with my amp and going through the canals. I played in Taiwan because I composed some music for a pretty famous Buddhist master Hsing Yun from the Fo Guang Shan temple.  I studied traditional Chinese music for a while,  Persian, Iranian music and in the last two years, I've studied some Carnatic music online, with a  Indian music Divina.  So I've all kinds of exciting stuff and managed to make a meager living through it all,  just scraping by.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Nick Kiss was involved in Metro Vancouver’s waste industry for 14 years prior to starting Bokashi Living in 2013. 


“I was part of the change and the effort that Metro Vancouver was implementing in trying to create diversion strategies for the waste stream,” he explained.


He and his wife have been visiting Cortes Island every summer for years and now hope to find a home here. In this morning’s interview NIck explains why he believes in the Bokashi method of composting. 


NK:  “What always bothered me when I was in the waste management industry, was the amount of food waste that was being produced and nothing was being done with it. It was going to the landfill mostly, which  is a terrible thing to do with food waste  because when they rot they turn into methane which is a terrible greenhouse gas contributor.” 


“Any homeowner who does have a garden that they care about can stand to receive a great benefit if they deal with their food waste properly, and have a simple way to get it back into the soil.”


“I met up with two other individuals who were in a similar position, both with lots of experience and a little bit of time on their hands and a keen desire to try to affect change on a larger level  than our own personal lifestyles. We collectively decided  to make it our mission to try to educate North America on a new way of dealing with their food waste.” 


CC: How is the B,okashi method different from the way that millions of people are already composting?


NK: “When we're composting, any kind of composting really, we're just trying to be a steward of microbes. We're trying to create a home that's as attractive as possible so that the correct microbes that we want to encourage will come to it, thrive and do the work of composting. Composting is really just microbes at work.” 

“When we're dealing with traditional composting, it's the outdoor pile or bin or cone that most gardeners have in their garden. They're feeding that pile with organic material. The microbes  in that pile are aerobic, meaning that they want oxygen.”


"Our composting with Bokashi is anaerobic, meaning we want no air. It's a fundamental difference in the set of bacteria and the microbes that are involved doing the process. Anaerobic is also known as fermentation, which many people are keenly aware of nowadays, and its inherent benefit of generating probiotics, fermented foods and such. What we're doing with Bokashi composting is fermenting all our food waste." 


"There's a number of advantages that come with that versus traditional composting."

"The number one advantage in my mind is that you can ferment all of your food waste. No longer are we sorting or separating or high grading our food waste into just the vegetable waste, which most people are familiar with composting. When you're fermenting, if it's food waste coming from your kitchen it can go into your Bokashi bin: whether it's meat, dairy, bread or cooked food. If you can eat it,  if it comes from your plate: then you can put it into your Bokashi bin and ferment it." 


"The fermentation process is really just microbes doing their thing, which is inoculating that food waste thoroughly multiplying, taking it over even though we don't see them. That's what's happening." 


"When we ferment our food waste with these microbes, that food waste becomes very attractive to the soil ecology.  The biota that exists in our healthy soil, we dig it down into our gardens and the organisms that are in the garden will thrive off it and very quickly assimilate into the soil structure."

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) is launching a new transportation initiative.


“We're really excited to be launching this new Room for Rider Initiative. It's a mirror tag that people can hang in their rear view mirror to let people know that they're willing to give people a ride across Quadra,” explained Helen Hall, Executive Director of FOCI.  


BC Ferries used to dedicate lane 7, in their Campbell River terminal, to Cortes traffic. Now that this has been discontinued, It is difficult for hitchhikers to know which vehicles could take them across Quadra Island to the Heriot Bay terminal. 


CC: Do you know how many people would be affected by this?  


HH: “It's hard to give numbers, but I think pretty much everyone on Cortes at some point has tried to get a hitch across Quadra.”


“I've done that myself. I was on my way to England. I had a very large suitcase with me and I was very nervous about getting a ride because it then tied into me getting a couple of flights and I just walked up to some people and got offered a ride. It was actually Valerie and Doug and they gave me a ride and ever afterwards we always used to say hello to each other and chat . So it was a lovely way to get to know them and they really helped me out on that day and I'm sure everyone's got really great stories about how they've shared rides across Quadra.” 


“We think it will really help people on Cortes get home in particular, but also we know there's visitors coming onto the island and struggling to get across Quadra, so hopefully it'll help them too.” 


CC: Is this coordinated with the rideshare initiative as well? 


HH: “No it's not, but  we did some research from other rideshare initiatives to inform this project.” 


“One of the things we were conscious of, as an organization, is the liability issue. We are taking no liability for people sharing rides. The drivers can choose who they allow into their cars and whether they want to charge people. That's entirely up to the people offering rides. Hitchhikers can choose which cars they want to get rides from.”


CC: How do you get these tags? 


HH: “On Monday they'll be available from the post office counters at Manson's and Whaletown. They're also available from the Klahoose multi-purpose building and from the FOCI office, which is open 9 to 5, five days of the week. We're also going to be at the summer markets through July and August, so people can pick them up from there as well”. 


“There's informational posters up already on the ferries and in both the waiting rooms to let people know that they can look for these mirror tags in the cars and we'll be posting posters up all around the island too.” 


CC: How many tags have you got? 

HH: 
“We've printed 500 tags and we're really grateful to Hollyhock, the Cortes Co-op and Cortes Kayaks for sponsoring the tags. If they go really well, then we'll print some more.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Around 60 representatives from non-profits on Cortes, Quadra, and some of the other islands recently gathered at Hollyhock. One of the breakout sessions was on climate adaption. Cortes Currents subsequently met with Max Thaysen, facilitator of that workshop, as well as Bruce Ellingsen, a participant.  


“I was asked to host a conversation about climate adaptation, which we expanded into climate mitigation, stopping the pollution that's causing the damage and adjusting our systems and life ways to be able to tolerate the pollution and the damage,” explained Thaysen.


CC: How does that apply to Cortes Island? 


Max Thaysen: “Climate change is a phenomenon that affects every part of planet earth with all kinds of diverse impacts. We started by just hearing from everybody about what sorts of impacts they've already learned about, that we can expect more of on Cortes Island as well as in other parts of the world that affect our lives here.”


“We talked about wildfire risk, and  food supplies. Most of the food that people eat on Cortes comes from off island, and the places where it's grown are already impacted by climate change. We talked about how much warming we can adapt to, and whether we can expect the warming to stay within that range.” 


CC: What about wells and the local aquifer? 


Max Thaysen: “We did wonder about some gaps in our knowledge about the aquifers that supply water to Cortes Islanders. We had a couple anecdotal stories about people's wells already running dry this year. We talked about some options for responding to that, such as dealing with ditches to get the water that flows at other times of year back into the ground and into aquifers. Also building some storage options, either buying tanks or digging ponds on people's land.”


“We're just starting what is normally the drier part of the year.”

CC: Can you give me any more detail for any specific climate impacts? Anything from dryness to wells, to wildfires? According to the historical record, Cortes hasn’t had more than two wildfires larger than 10 hectors since 1950. 


“I only ever heard of one, around the Gorge and over towards Whaletown in 1896, but that was purely anecdotal when I was a young person,” added Ellingsen. 


He did not know how widespread it was, aside from the fact it was in Whaletown and did not spread beyond the east end of the Gorge.


Max Thaysen: “We don't live in a place that has typically had a high wildfire risk, but I think that's changing and it's something that we should pay more attention to. Lots of climate scientists or system scientists say that we're living on a new planet now. The norms that we were used to, such as Cortes Island doesn't burn very much or very often, is changing.”


“I'm just reading 'Fire Weather' by John Valiant. It's a pretty wild story about how fire has changed in Canada. It's a completely new animal. It creates its own conditions for burning. It dries the land out before it gets to it. It creates its own wind and starts its own fires.  It's important that we don't just think about how things have worked in the past, but we also try to keep updated to the new situation that we find ourselves in.”

Photo credit: Wildfire - Photo by Marcus Kauffman on Unsplash

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents -The Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) have a full slate of events this summer.

They started July with a tour of the off-grid agricultural oasis, Blue Jay Farm, followed by a low tide exploration of the natural and local history of Mansons Lagoon.

“They've gone really well, and we've got these other six events coming up,” explained to Helen Hall, Executive Director of FOCI.

On Sunday, the 23rd of July, we've got a wonderful wetland tour with Autumn Barrett Morgan to learn about the Dylan Creek Wetland at Linnaea Farm and also about the restoration project that's gone on there.

Starting on Saturday the 20th of August, we have a Linnaea Farm tour, which is always really popular and that gives people a chance to learn about Linnaea, get up close to some of the farm animals and see the bed garden too.

On Tuesday, the 23rd of August, we've got a sunrise with seabirds event with Bill Ophoff, the naturalist from Hollyhock. it's gonna be an early morning walk along the beach looking for seabirds and other marine life.

On Saturday, the 26th of August, we've got an eco poetry workshop with Soma Feldmar. It's a day long workshop. Where we're gonna be exploring the natural world and writing poems.

Finally on Tuesday the 29th of August, we've got another gum boot in the Lagoon event with Dew Cowper, who's a brilliant marine biologist from Campbell River and Melanie Boyle, who's the general manager at the museum. That's going to be exploring the lagoon at the low tide, looking for marine life, but also learning about local geology and history.

“It's gonna be a great summer. I think these activities are a great way for people to discover the island and learn about the natural environment. We get a mix of people. These are really nice outings for locals, as well as for people visiting the island,” said Hall.

“We are encouraging people to do is book early because the events are really popular. Email us at friends of cortez gmail.com or phone us on (250) 935-0087 to book your spot.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Sea lice are a serious problem for the fish farm sector, but a new study from the University of British Columbia has found there are viruses that prey upon them.


“In theory viruses might be deployed in a way in which they might be able to help control sea ice densities in aquaculture. I certainly wouldn't be a proponent of that at this stage, and would strongly advise against that because we just don't know enough about it,” explained senior author Dr. Curtis Suttle.


“I'm a professor at the University of British Columbia, and my group works primarily on different kinds of microbes and different kinds of pathogens.  One of the exciting things that we found recently is that there's a lot of viruses which infect sea lice, which were previously completely unknown.” 


His team found 30 previously unknown RNA viruses in sea lice. 


“What we also know is that these viruses do appear to be replicating and infecting the sea lice. We could see that the sea lice were mounting a very specific immune response to the individual viruses infecting them.” 


“We were only looking at wild salmon smolts, not at anything to do with fish farms per se, but we would assume that viruses might be prevalent within fish farms when population densities are high. Sea lice are a parasite, their populations will grow really fast because essentially they're unlimited in terms of the number of hosts that they can exploit. So in those kinds of situations, populations tend to get out of control. You would expect that viruses would be able to spread from sea lice to sea lice relatively quickly.”


His team collected the viruses found in sea lice on five sites, ranging from southern Quadra Island to the Broughton Archipelago. Cortes Currents was especially interested in their findings in the Discovery Islands, done in collaboration with the Hakai Institute. 


“You can be sure that these viruses infecting sea lice are the same viruses that are swimming around Cortes,” he said. 

CC: Are any of these RNA viruses that you were studying known to be  fatal to sea lice, or is that unknown? 


CS: “That’s a complete unknown, and a very difficult question to address because the only way that you could really do that would be to be able to culture and grow sea lice. The only way that I know to grow and culture sea lice is to infect a fish. It becomes a very complicated experiment. You would have to have large quarantine facilities, take salmon that have sea lice and put some in with viruses, some without viruses and see what those consequences are.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The Directors of Cortes Island (Area B), Areas A and C are opposed to the idea that their ratepayers should help finance renovations to the Strathcona Gardens facility in Campbell River. The Strathcona Regional District’s portion of financing the new aquatic and wellness centre is expected to be around $73 million. Last April the SRD Board approved a bylaw allowing them to borrow $64,670.000. This debt is currently the responsibility of property owners in the City of Campbell River and Electoral Area D, where most of the facility’s users reside. At the June 28 SRD Board meeting, Directors John Rice of Area D and Susan Sinnot of Campbell River brought forward a motion that staff look into the option that ratepayers in Areas A, B, and C pick up part of the tab.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - More than 130 people gathered in the Village Commons to celebrate the opening of the new Rainbow Ridge Trail System. As it was a hot summer’s day, most of them clung to shade beneath trees, awnings and the main tent. 


Rose and Brenda Hanson, from the Klahoose First Nation, opened the ceremony.


“This is a song you all are likely familiar with. It's very fittingly titled ‘The Welcome Song.’ It was composed multiple years ago with my mom Rose, her sister my Auntie Helen and her other sister Auntie Marge. Little did we know, at that time, that this song would travel so far. I'm so grateful and honoured that it has been used with such high purpose since its creation and I'm very happy and pleased to be here to share it with you today,” said Brenda.


She used the Salish names for the Klahoose Nation and their territory, adding their song is for ‘all the people that come from other places and other lands.’ 


“The song expresses, we are so very grateful in our hearts that you have come. Welcome, welcome to these lands.”


Sandra Wood, Executive Director of the Cortes Housing Society, cut the ribbon opening the trails.  


 “We're very excited to share with the community the Rainbow Ridge connections to our neighbouring properties. That's going to make it possible for people to walk between the Seniors Village, the Health Centre and the school towards Manson's Hall via the Rainbow Ridge property and the Village Commons property. It's a new trail system that's connecting from east to west, a number of nonprofit properties in the Manson's corridor.  We've also made improvements on the north-south connection of Rainbow Ridge so that it better connects with the Siskin Forest Trail system. We've moved part of the trail to higher ground on Rainbow Ridge so that it will be a drier trail through the winter months,” she explained.


“These trails are part of a bigger vision of having active transportation and a network of trails where people can walk and bicycle. It's part of climate change adaptation to use your vehicle less. It's part of getting out and exercising and being in nature, and it's part of just being in community and bumping into your neighbour on the trails. We had a lot of reasons to develop this trail network on Rainbow Ridge. Someday there's going to be 24 families who live in the rental town homes that we plan to build on Rainbow Ridge, but these public trails are something that will be there for everyone in the community, as well as visitors to Cortes.”


“I think it's an important part of keeping the Rainbow Ridge property in community hands and enjoyed by the public. I also think it's part of another bigger strategy where there's a lot of key properties now owned by the Cortes Island Senior Society, the Southern Community Association which owns Manson's Hall, the Cortes Island Community Foundation and the Cortes Community Economic Development Association (CCEDA), who own the Village Commons, as well as the Housing Society that own the Rainbow Ridge property. We've got all this fantastic community land in community hands, and I think these trails are really helping us to connect all of those parcels together to make these corridors possible and connecting to the wider park system like the Siskin Trail network and even the School to Sea Trail system that will take people to Manson's dock and Manson's Lagoon. You'll be able to go all the way from that northernmost part of Manson's by trail as far south as Smelt Bay Provincial Park. It's a really important way to connect our community. I really wanted to make that a part of this project.”