So long as there are people living near Cowichan Bay in the numbers that currently occupy the space, I believe this bay will never be “pristine”. It’s simply not possible. Everybody contributes a little bit to the overall picture. Nobody is exempt from blame.
We have the waste water outflow from Duncan, treated with chlorine, in the main river. We have microplastics, much of it from laundered synthetic clothing in that water as well, none of which is removed.
We have a productive farm field which is regularly manured on the other river. So long as people enjoy keeping lawns, there will always be an excess of lawn care materials filtering down with the runoff waters when it rains.
We have people driving vehicles along a road which borders the bay dripping whatever they occasionally drip, shedding microscopic synthetic rubber particles from their tires.
We have marinas with boats, float homes and so forth, each dropping even under best case scenarios all manner of things into the water. Some of these things are harmful, some inert and others beneficial. I put all my eggshells into the sea. The calcium is better used by crabs and other marine life than it would be going into the landfill.
Then we have the legacy materials, all the things lost, dropped, dripped and slopped in all the years past. There are sunken boats, lost crab traps (some of them perpetual crab killing machines) plastic buckets, old paint brushes, metals and so forth.
The bay has several monitoring stations, where sensors are in place to keep track of areas once occupied by massive above ground fuel tanks. The fuel lines, some of which go underneath the town’s road are still all there, slowly turning to rust. The wooded area across the street from Rob’s Lighthouse was one site, the concrete footings are now merely hidden by the greenery.
(That funny looking “meteorite” with the heron sculpture that sticks up out of the water at nearby Genoa Bay is another example of what I call “Legacy Material”. It’s made up of metal bandsaw filings that were deposited over the years when there used to be a huge sawmill next to and above those waters. It occupied the space now taken up by the Genoa Bay Cafe. The hot sparks and grindings were deposited through a hole in the floor beneath the sharpening machines, to avoid the possibility of a mill fire. The metal granules piled up, rusted together and the “meteorite was born.)
So… No, the waters of Cowichan bay will never be “pristine” The microplastics issue alone is enough for me to want to avoid any shellfish that might be produced here. Shellfish are filter feeders and easily contaminated by anything in the water. The plastics go in and stay there. Then we eat the seafood and voila, the plastics stay in us as well.
What we can do though. is learn from the past, avoid poor practices and move to a future that leaves the Bay and it’s waters better than they were. This is what people have been working toward and thankfully will undoubtedly continue to do.
