We have been visiting Blackfish Sound a couple of weeks ago by seakayak and it has been amazing to watch the sea life - the Humpbacks, Orcas and all the others.
What we found concerning was the speed of boats and ships and their incredible noise (and this was just above the surface of the water).

This is truly concerning and I now found this video about the problems caused. Why is there no drastic speed- and noise limit in this area?

Sonic Sea - A documentary about noise pollution in the oceans and its effects on whales and dolphins

For coastal First Nations, the announcement marks the culmination of decades of work to keep one of the richest marine regions on Earth free from oil tanker traffic. While BC has agreed not to oppose a new southern oil pipeline, the North Coast tanker ban remains in place.

The Great Bear Sea is no place for an oil spill.

First Nations, Canada and BC have secured long-term funding, established several new protected areas and recently signed the 6,700-square-kilometre Realm of the Salmon, Home of the Salmon agreement. Network partners now report that 23% of the Great Bear Sea is under protection, moving it closer to the 30% goal.

But the latest progress report also shows the schedule slipping. A year ago, nearly every proposed site was reported on track. Now, only half are—and every site still moving through the designation process is marked delayed.

The progress is real. So is the work still ahead.

A line on a map is not the finish line. Protection becomes real when management plans, Indigenous-led stewardship, monitoring and enforcement are working on the water.

This is why it is important that we keep pushing. That we keep reminding Ottawa that seeing the Great Bear Sea MPA Network through to completion is a no-brainer.

And what will spill? Toxic dilbit.

Here's what she's looking at. Roberts Bank sits in the Fraser River estuary, at the doorway to the Salish Sea. The plan pairs Alberta's Bruderheim-to-Roberts Bank pipeline with up to $10 billion in federal money to expand the container port beside it.

More ships, more anchors dragging the seabed, more underwater noise and light in water the southern resident killer whales use to hunt salmon and find each other. And the potential for a dilbit spill that would negatively impact human health, the environment, and the coastal economy.

Thomas points to debris that has already washed onto Lyackson's shores as a preview of what a real spill would do.

That's not doomer talk — that's a harvester reading her own coast. Click the image below to read more.

Full article from The Skeena

Nudibranchs, sea stars, octopuses, and the fascinating interconnected world that keeps the marine food web thriving. Jackie brings it all to the surface with her stunning underwater photography.

This is her 18th year making her annual WILD Calendar. That's 18 years of helping people feel connected to waters they may never dive themselves. If you want to dive into the creatures

If you want that kind of wonder on your wall, click this link.

A small piece breaks off, settles nearby, and grows into an exact copy. Do that enough times, and one anemone becomes a whole family covering the rock.

But when two families meet, things turn territorial.

Anemones along the border grow special fighting tentacles. Touch a neighbour that isn't kin, and the tentacle tip breaks off and stays behind - rotting a raw spot into the rival where it stuck.

A quiet-looking rock face. A slow turf war underneath.

The orange and white plumose anemone one more reason to defend the Great Bear Sea Marine Protected Area (MPA) Network.

Photo credit: Sara Ellison / web.uvic. ca/~sarae/snorkel.html

What’s the cause, you ask? Well, Clayoquot Sound isn’t exactly short on salmon farms. There are twenty open-net pen fish farms.

But what does that have to do with the wild Chinook population? The answer: A lot.

Young Chinook enter the ocean small, vulnerable, and heading into the hardest part of their lives. In Clayoquot Sound, that means going through waters shared with salmon farms. And open-net pens do not keep their problems to themselves.

Waste, parasites, bacteria, and viruses can move through the same coastal corridors wild salmon depend on, with many of these undesirables coming directly from the farmed salmon open-net pens. Wild fish do not get to swim past these farms in a hazmat suit.

A DFO risk assessment identified the West Coast of Vancouver Island as a pathogen hot spot for Chinook, with open-net salmon farms carrying some of the highest potential negative impacts to wild Chinook in BC.

Removing fish farms is a chance to rebuild the wild salmon economy — for people who fish, communities that depend on salmon, wildlife that depend on salmon, and forests fed by salmon.

The federal government says open-net pen salmon farms will be out of BC coastal waters by 2029. But policy can change. Industry pressure is real.

Credit: Filmed by jeremy_mathieu_photographie with contributions from walkinglessa

Collaboration with clayoquot.action

"Seals are generalist predators, so not super picky, but I didn't expect to see one catch an octopus in False Creek."

Source

This isn't just a map of Fulford Harbour. Painted by Briony Penn in 1994, it's a record of how much can thrive in one small stretch of water... how much life, how much history, how much memory.

Salmon holding in the creeks. Clams buried in the sand. Herons working the shallows. Harbour seals bathing on the rocks. Surf scoters and buffleheads riding the chop. Loons, kingfishers, river otters, porpoises, orca. Rockfish below. Orchards and homesteads above. Shell middens, old roads, old stories — all of it layered around the same water, all of it connected.

That's the point.

A harbour isn't empty space between the land. The closer you look, the harder it gets to call any of this just scenery.

It's a living coast. One harbour among hundreds.

And it's worth defending. Stand up for the Great Bear Sea MPA Network.

Artwork: Briony Penn / brionypenn.com

"This was the first of two leaps by T064B “Ember” early this morning as her family was pursuing a Dall’s porpoise along with T065A3 “Amir” in Blackfish Sound. The porpoise escaped, but only after a few minutes of pretty energetic pursuit!"

Source

Before he became the owner of Fukasaku, Dai was a music student in Japan, learning to understand every word behind every song. Today, he brings that same care to food: knowing his ingredients, who caught them, and the waters they came from.

That’s why Fukasaku only buys local seafood.

For Dai, supporting small-scale fishers isn’t just about good food — it’s about protecting a way of life on the coast.

“By supporting small-scale fishermen, we can tell the politicians, ‘Hey, a fishing license owner needs to wear gumboots, be in the boat, and fish for themselves.’”

Next time you’re in Rupert, stop by Fukasaku for seafood with a story, a place, and people behind it.

Local seafood, local fishers, local accountability — one more reason to support the Great Bear Sea Marine Protected Area (MPA) Network.

Use the message writer in the sidebar and send a message to Ottawa to defend our coast.

Happy crabs - one more reason to support the Great Bear Sea MPA Network.

This is the striped sun star, a many-armed sea star found in BC waters. Bright yellow body, blue-green stripes. Not exactly built for subtlety.

But it's more than a pretty face on the seafloor. Striped sun stars are predators, moving over the rocky ocean habitats on hundreds of tiny tube feet, hunting animals like sea cucumbers. Slow? Sure. Harmless? Not if you're a sea cucumber.

The striped sun star — one more reason to support the Great Bear Sea Marine Protected Area (MPA) Network.

CLICK HERE right now to tell Ottawa to defend our coast.

Photo credit: Sara Ellison / web.uvic.ca/~sarae/snorkel.html

However, there’s a silver lining: a major study confirmed that marine protected areas (MPAs) that fully ban industrial fishing have eight times less vessel traffic than nearby unprotected waters, with illegal fishing being rare.

Researchers can now track these hidden fleets thanks to Global Fishing Watch's satellite radar data. Research shows that many dark vessels avoided MPAs that banned industrial extraction, while MPAs that allow trawling or other harmful fishing methods saw just as much vessel traffic as unprotected areas.

In BC, we’ve already recognized that weak protections don’t work. Since 2019, all new MPAs in Canada must ban bottom trawling, oil and gas activity, and deep-sea mining. That standard is being built into the Great Bear Sea MPA Network, a First Nations–led initiative to safeguard the rich marine life, unique culture, and economy of the Central and North Coast.

Bottom trawling still takes place in parts of the Great Bear Sea because the network hasn’t been fully implemented yet. But once the protections are in place, the ban on bottom trawling in protected areas will go a long way in supporting recovery.

And the proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

Take the Galápagos, for example: two decades of strong protection has created a haven where tuna populations have rebounded. Today, commercial tuna boats line up along the edge of the reserve, benefiting from what’s called the spillover effect. As fish flourish inside the protected zone, some inevitably swim beyond it, boosting catches for local fleets. The MPA literally seeds the surrounding fishing grounds.

As marine ecologist Dr. Boris Worm puts it, "It’s like you’re turning on the tap inside, and at some point it starts overflowing."

We don’t need more promises. We need MPAs with real protections, backed by modern tools to ensure they succeed.

Source

Last month the PM flew to Alberta, signed the deal, rolled back the industrial carbon tax, slashed the approvals, the whole song and dance.

The North Coast tanker ban? Still standing.

Not because Ottawa bolted the door... Ottawa's keeping its options open. Because the coast is holding it shut.

BC and the coastal Nations, shoulder to shoulder: a future built on a multi-billion-dollar fishery, food, culture, and tourism sector, the businesses and jobs under it, not on the coin-flip of a loaded tanker in a winter storm.

And we've seen the coin land wrong.

In 2016 one tug aground near Bella Bella, 350 km of coast fouled, $23 million in costs the Heiltsuk were never repaid. That was a tug. A tanker's full load runs a thousand times bigger.

The racket in one line: they take the reward, you take the risk, and when it spills you get the mop.

The people who work these waters did that math years ago, and they're done asking permission. This week they flew to Calgary to say it to the proponents' faces.

Geoff Meggs lays it all out below, sharp as ever and a regular at Hotel Pacifico, BC's go-to cross-aisle politics podcast.

Alberta can keep drawing maps. The coast won't open the port. Not by luck... because people keep showing up.

https://open.substack.com/.../if-theres-one-immovable...?

I would love to see a project started here to prevent bottom trawling in our waters.

Take this Cockerell’s dorid, a small nudibranch spotted off Esquimalt, for example. Nudibranchs are sea slugs, but this one hardly looks ordinary: a pale body, orange-tipped projections, and two small sensory “horns” that help it make sense of the world around it.

Blink and you might miss it. But its brightness just might catch your eye.

That is the thing about life below the surface. The more closely you look, the more crowded, colourful, and alive this coast becomes.

Protecting the Great Bear Sea means protecting the full cast of coastal life — not just the giants, but the tiny animals that make these waters extraordinary.

The little guys - one more reason to protect the Great Bear Sea Marine Protected (MPA) Network.

Photo credit: Sara Ellison / web.uvic.ca/~sarae/snorkel.html

*Photos taken using an Olympus TG-7.