Tara and I also believe we have given our children the best any parents could — unstinting love, a variety of experiences at home and in other parts of the world, and a good education. What more support do they need from us to face the future? Now our parental responsibilities are complete; though one may do so, there is no further obligation to pass on money, valuable goods, or property to them.
When Tara and I first met, one of the places we spent time together was her parents' waterfront cottage on Sechelt Inlet on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast. We loved it there. Across the inlet was a muddy beach where we would dig for clams, feel cockles beneath our feet, and set our crab traps. I would cast out from the family float and catch ling cod, and we would take the rowboat offshore and fish for rock cod. We even got lucky and caught the occasional salmon.
But the relentless pressure of people like me meant that over time the ling have disappeared, easy victims of their ferocious appetites and aggressive territoriality. The rock cod on which we depended for breakfast became scarcer and smaller, while more and more cottages sprouted up around us with the inevitable increase in boom boxes, outdoor parties, and water skiers. Across the inlet, an entire hillside was shaved bare of its trees, and then poles and roads appeared, warning of the huge development that followed and the homes that now light up the night. After fifteen years, it was time to find our own place to retreat to from the city.
We began the search with the help of Tara's retired parents, who could check out some of the places that interested us. We spent months scouring properties for sale on the islands between the British Columbia mainland and Vancouver Island in the search for an ideal site that would give us a sense of isolation yet was affordable and reasonably accessible to Vancouver. We had focused on three pieces of land that were available on Quadra and Cortes islands near Campbell River on Vancouver Island. When we walked onto the land Tara later named Tangwyn (Welsh for “place of peace and restoration”), we knew instantly it was what we sought. Its ten acres contained some magnificent old-growth Douglas fir trees, a small creek, and perhaps a third of a mile of water-front that included beaches, rocky promontories, and at low tide a huge tidal pool. A land bridge connected Tangwyn and unoccupied Heriot Island adjacent to us. Tangwyn became our talisman, the place where we wanted our children to feel a strong bond to nature. And it became the place where the girls and our grandchildren would learn how to fish, then clean, cook, and eat their catch.
I love to fish, because fish are a major part of my diet and of who I am. I know sportspeople and conservationists advocate catch-and-release fishing, but I don't. There is no question that when we “play” a fish, the animal is struggling for its life. Usually a fish is worked to exhaustion before being released, so upon liberation, it is an easy target for predators like birds and seals. Fishing for trout in a lake in the Okanagan region of south-central B.C., I noticed loons hovering near the canoe and soon realized they had learned to take a fish right off the hook or to grab it when it was released. Marine seals have learned the same thing.
The fish don't volunteer to be a part of our “sport,” and the notion of torturing them for pleasure and then releasing them as if we are being considerate and protective simply perpetuates the notion that nature and other species are playthings for our enjoyment. I know vegans condemn the catching and eating of fish as antithetical to a reverence for life, but I accept that as an animal, I depend on the consumption of other life to survive (plants are life forms too), and I try to do it with respect and gratitude.
IF WE AVOID TRAFFIC jams and make all the ferry connections just right, it takes just over five hours (six if we're unlucky) to get from Vancouver to Tangwyn. As we ride the last ferry from Campbell River to Quathiaski Cove on Quadra, our excitement grows and we delight in the sight of the island hills covered in forest, the dense schools of herring, the fishing boats pursuing salmon, and the ever-present eagles ready to swoop down and take a careless fish. We feel the joy of arriving back where nature is still abundant and intact.
But when we talk to our neighbors who have lived in the area for fifty years or more, they describe a world that no longer exists around there: bays filled with abalone, red snapper, gigantic ling cod and rock cod as long as an arm, herring so abundant they could be raked off the kelp to fill a punt in minutes, and schools of salmon so thick they could be heard coming as their bodies slapped the water miles away. Today all of that is gone. Six years after we had bought Tangwyn, we were fishing for rock cod when Tara hooked a large ling. I watched in disappointment yet admiration as she removed the hook and carefully returned the fish to the water. “This is the first big ling we've seen in six years,” she said. “We can't kill it.”
Even in the brief time Tangwyn has been part of our lives, we have seen the herring vanish because of the insane fishery permitting the capture of spawning herring for the females' ovaries, which bring a high return in Japan. I call it insane because herring are one of the key prey species for salmon, seals, whales, and other carnivorous fishes, and First Nations have long harvested their eggs without killing the fish. Because the spawning herring form large schools, they become such easy prey that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans actually has had ten-minute openings — seiners are allowed ten minutes to set their nets with the potential to make a year's worth of pay for the crew members. What kind of a delusion is it to think a ten-minute season is a fishery that is sustainable? Years ago, one opening for the herring roe fishery wiped out the large populations around Tangwyn, and they still haven't come back.
Abalone were once abundant throughout the islands in Georgia Strait, but when scuba divers were allowed to “harvest” them, they quickly disappeared and have not come back. In the fifteen years we have gone to Tangwyn, we have found two live abalone — essentially they are extinct, and it is highly doubtful they will ever come back within my children's lifetime.
Geoducks (pronounced “gooey-ducks”), the huge clams whose siphons are highly prized in Asia, are being blasted out of the ocean bottom by divers wielding pressure hoses. The clams are like nuggets of gold but are exploited with almost no idea of their biology or life cycle; they may reach decades if not a century or more in age. I watched in helpless fury as divers spent two days off the shores of Tangwyn pumping geoducks out of the ocean floor. We were delighted to find a small patch of perhaps fifty geoducks at low tide that had been missed by the commercial divers, only to see them trashed by oyster farmers dragging heavy loads of spat-laden shells across them.
Rock cod, which we once took for granted as a dependable meal, have been depleted by commercial fishers, who ship them live to the Asian market. When the DFO announced a quota for sport fishers of one rock cod a day, it was clear the fish should be declared totally off-limits to all fishing until they can replenish themselves.
We tend to think of the oceans as a homogeneous environment from which we can catch creatures that are somehow magically replaced without end. We know that as a rule, the bigger, older animals are far more prolific than younger fish, yet we allow fishers to keep the largest and return the small ones as if somehow this is good management. I believe we should allow fewer fish to be caught, encourage release of large ones, and mandate that fishers stop letting the small ones go until a trophy fish is captured. Once sport fishers have caught their limit of salmon, they often target other fish, like ling and halibut, loading up with hundreds of pounds of fish. They may proudly display halibut more than six and a half feet long and weighing over 165 pounds and release the chickens (under 30 pounds), which is exactly the opposite of what should be done.