Who will save the Cowichan?
Bear with me while I indulge in a back-in-the-day moment.
I grew up on the Cowichan River. Home was on the stretch known locally in Lake Cowichan as the Big Pool and summers were spent in the water. Across the river, back and forth, my friends and I would swim to visit, dry out on the dock, and then plunge back in to swim home. I didn’t know then it was an idyllic time.
My dad’s ashes were scattered on the waters of the river he’d fished for 40 years and 30 years later my mother’s followed — although the presence of some tubers idling just off our old dock were an annoyance at that ceremony.
I no longer live there, but love for the river runs deep and Stephen Hume’s recent article in the Vancouver Sun (“Is sunscreen killing B.C.’s Cowichan River” – July 13) and the Times Colonist (“Sunscreen a new suspect in slow dying of Cowichan River” – July 22) is distressing.
In the article Joe Saysell, unofficial guardian of the river, speaks of the absence of fly hatchings. I recall those early summer days when the river would bubble, like on a slow boil, as the flies would rise from the surface. According to Saysell, the mayflies, stoneflies and caddis flies of the Cowichan, essential to the trout for which the river is an acclaimed fishing destination, are absent. Sunscreen worn by the thousands enjoying the new tubing industry is believed to be the cause.
River tubing has gone from a nice-to-do activity for casual tubers a few years ago to a major destination attraction drawing visitors from on and off shore. Visiting Vancouver Island? Don’t forget to take in a tube ride down the Cowichan.
On hot summer days and peak weekends, people by the hundreds board tubes at the head of the river and float lazily downstream for a couple hours or more to their landing site at a spot rightly known as Little Beach. It’s a lovely way to wile an afternoon.
Saysell says that on peak weekends, more than 1,000 people per day take to tubes on the river. Look over either side of the bridge mid-summer and the river is blanketed with people enjoying an activity that may be harming one of Canada’s heritage waterways.
And that’s the point.
When the Cowichan was designated one of Canada’s 42 heritage rivers in 2003, the federal and provincial governments committed to work with community stewardship groups to conserve the river and its natural, cultural and recreational values. Of these, who is monitoring the long-term health of the river so that it is more than a tubing mecca?
To help preserve the integrity of the Colorado River, the US Park Service restricts recreational rafting through the Grand Canyon. Likewise, closer to home, there is a limit to the number of hikers allowed on the West Coast Trail at any one time.
Tubing and the summer visitors it brings to the town of Lake Cowichan is surely a boost to a community that once relied on the forest industry and, understandably, the businesses involved and those that indirectly benefit from the tubing traffic welcome it.
But when only people on tubes and sunscreen — not insects — cover the surface of the river, surely it’s time for governments at all levels — local, regional, provincial, federal and First Nations — and those who care about the Cowichan to consider priorities and develop a plan for its survival.
Gery Lemon
Victoria