Earlier this year I was approached by the Vancouver Island magazine, TAKE 5 to undertake an underwater survey of the old industrial harbor of Ladysmith BC. Being a diver and wreck hound dating back to the late 1970’s, I could not resist.
The area has long been an industrial harbor exporting coal commencing in the 1890s and then it was the site of a copper smelter firing up in 1902. Since then the harbor has undergone a radical transformation from a heavy industrial port to commercial fishing then to recreational harbor.
Over generations the use of the waterways has changed but what hasn’t changed, until recently, is man’s proclivity to see the oceans and waterways as a garbage dump. It was far too easy to discard whatever was not needed into the salt chuck as it would be instantly devoured. It was a convenient arrangement as the garbage was out sight, to settle into the sands of the ocean floor and in time to be consumed by the dissolving properties of the waters and ultimately flushed out by the tides.
Of recent, Ladysmith Harbor, or as it is locally known as the “Dog Patch,” by either circumstances or by choice has become home to a score of individuals who live aboard barges, sail boats or converted fishing boat. These individuals live a lifestyle foreign to most shore side dirt dwellers, but they live a life no less appropriate as there is a long history of communal floating along the B.C. coast
My diving expedition was to determine how man’s activity over the previous 150 years has impacted the marine environment and what, if anything should be done about it.
Take 5 produced a video of my expedition to uncover what lay below the surface of Ladysmith’s waters and I encourage my followers to watch. But to surmise what I found is best described as a paradox as it is life and death intertwined. The video link is at the bottom of this post.
There is no doubt that in the early years, man’s industrial activities in the bay left behind a legacy of a toxic seafloor, a substrate consisting of coal dust and noxious copper mining tailings, all disguised, cloaked in sediment from shore side development. The harbor bottom is a moonscape, a dead zone incapable of sustaining life.
Then came alone the commercial fishing era which, was more ecologically friendly but still brought its own blight upon the waterways. In the early year’s fish entrails, motor oil, worn out netting, gear and sewage was regularly discharged into the harbor, typically alongside the boat while at dock. Often boats sank along the docks either due to storms or neglect, all of which, excluding oil and sewage, I observed in my dives.
Still of all the human activity the harbor has endured over the last century, the least impact has come from the contemporary users and current live-a-boards, the houseboat people who now reside within the “Dog Patch.”
During my dives I was surprised to find little in the way of domestic garbage, trash which appeared to be intentionally thrown overboard. As to the sewage issue and whether it was more than the environment could absorb, I cannot say.
As a commercial diver I had a direct hand in the construction of the sewer outfalls for both the city of Victoria on Vancouver island and that of the Ganges Harbor pipeline on Saltspring Island. Sadly two of countless lines responsible for discharging tens of millions of liters per minute of semi-treated sewage into the sea along the BC coast. The degree of pollution contributed to local Dog Patch by residents would be debatable.
What remains below the waters at the Dog Patch is concoction of shipwrecks and industrial debris all of which has provided a perch upon which marine life has since flourished.
Upon the otherwise desolate bottom of the “Dog Patch” there is an odd assortment of human jetsam, on which mother ocean has grasped the opportunity to create an oasis of life, a garden surrounded by a desolate, inhospitable landscape/ Seascape? The effluence of the industrialized twentieth century killed all life within the bay, but after the demise of the localized industrialized industry, life has regained a foot hold, fighting to flourish upon the industries very bones. And its winning!
The Naked Canadian 