Cowichan Bay Village, Floating on a Mirror
If you look at the surface of the water between the docks, our float homes and boats, it often looks like a pane of dirty glass. Looking down we can easily see a few little fish, crabs and the occasional starfish. Barnacles and mussels are affixed to almost every surface.
It is only after you try looking in the other direction that you come to have even the slightest inkling of how very amazing the world these creatures inhabit is, and how very different from the one we wander about in, trapped as we are at the bottom of a fairly shallow ocean of “air”.
Both of these short videos were taken last summer by Michelle and show the area more or less beneath the float home where we live.
The first was more or less a test of the camera and it’s waterproof capabilities, the long lines in the video are water hoses and old electrical cabling. Notice how much current there is, and how full of nutrients the water flow is. It’s almost as if a wind storm were blowing on land.
The second shows what happens when you drop a salmon head over the side of your boat. A huge fight ensued between two crabs over the gigantic (to them) morsel. Unfortunately, they took their fight outside the range of our camera before long.
