Fireside Books: There's exciting news for book lovers. Fireside Books in Parksville now has a second location in Port Alberni. The Bookwyrm. Used books are just five dollars or less. The Bookwyrm on the corner of Redford and Anderson opens seven days a week from ten to five. Fireside Books at 464 Island Highway East in Parksville is a book dragon's dream come true. Browse their extensive collections seven days a week. Order online at firesidebooks.ca and pick up at either location. Details available online. Ask about returning books for a book credit. 

Eddie Van Haddock & The Rockfish: In a little town by the sea where the stories never end, lived Captain Dave and his crew, every child's favourite friend. With a smile as wide as the ocean and a heart that's full of dreams, he sails a mellow submarine where magic gleams and beams. Every morning at sunrise, when the world awakes anew, Captain Dave and his crew set sail in waters deep and blue. Through the ticking clock of time, where adventures come alive, they laugh and learn and play each day in their underwater dive.

Dave Graham: Larry had heard about the kelp forest for weeks. Captain Dave had mentioned it first casually over dinner one evening, and since that moment, Larry had been unable to stop thinking about it. He had filled four pages of his clipboard with notes. He had drawn two diagrams.

He had spent a long afternoon attempting to build a scale model using spare rope, and a cork, and three spoons borrowed from the galley. But it had failed to communicate the scale or the drama, and had eventually been disassembled and put back in the drawer where it all came from. "Are you ready?" asked Captain Dave on the morning they finally pointed the Mellow Submarine towards Saratoga Beach and the waters off Courtenay.

"I have been ready," said Larry, "for nineteen days". Captain Dave laughed and poured his coffee. They left French Creek Harbor in the early morning, the water flat and silver, a mist still burning off the mountains to the west. A great blue heron lifting from a rock without hurry as they went by. On they went, following the long beach marking Qualicum Beach.

They waved to their friends at Deep Bay and the Marine Field Station located there. And on they went, Mud Bay, around Ship's Point, past Fanny Bay, Buckley Bay, Union Bay. Then they were up near Comox, and beyond that through deeper water, where the bottom on the sonar began to show the kind of complex, rocky, uneven terrain that the best kelp forests prefer.

"How do you find it?" asked Larry. "You can't see the forest from the surface." "You learn the coast," said Captain Dave. "Water temperature, kelp needs cold water, under about seventeen degrees. And depth, well, bull kelp grows best between about five and twenty meters. It needs something hard on the ocean floor to anchor to.

And light, it has to be clear enough water that sunlight can reach the bottom. When you know those conditions, and you know this coastline, well, you know where to look. The waters around Courtenay and Baynes Sound have been producing some of the finest kelp forests on the BC coast for as long as anyone has been recording them."

They stopped the engine half a kilometer from shore and drifted. The water here was darker green, deeper, colder, richer. On the sonar screen, Captain Dave pointed to a dense, textured display that occupied the space between the surface and the bottom. A thick, busy signal where the screen was almost black.

"That's it," he said. Larry looked at the screen, then he looked out the porthole at the dark green water, then back at the screen again. The forest on the sonar was enormous. It stretched across the entire display. "It's so tall," he said. "Bull kelp can grow to 30 meters," said Captain Dave, "and it achieves that height in a single growing season.

Bull kelp is an annual organism. It starts from a microscopic spore in early spring and reaches 30 meters by autumn. It's one of the fastest-growing organisms anywhere on the planet." "One season," Larry repeated slowly. He looked down at himself and then back at the sonar. "I have been growing for considerably more than one season, and I am substantially shorter than 30 meters."

"To be fair," said Captain Dave, "you have claws. The kelp does not." "That is true," said Larry, satisfied. Captain Dave put on his dry suit. Larry put on nothing at all, lobsters being waterproof as a matter of fundamental biology. Captain Dave engaged the submarine's slow dive mode and took them down gently into the green, the light changing as they descended, bright to filtered to something softer and more complex, the way light behaves when it has to travel through moving water before it reaches you, broken into shifting columns and patches and slow golden sweeps across the sea floor.

When they arrived at the kelp forest, it was enormous, impossible to take in all at once. The stalks rose from the rocky bottom in great smooth amber columns as thick as a grown person's arm, reaching upward without apparent effort, bending very slightly in the current. From the top of each stalk flowed long ribbon-like blades trailing in every direction, moving in slow continuous waves.

And above all of it, the canopy, round gas-filled floats pressing up against the surface of the water, jostling gently against each other, letting the light through in long shifting columns that swept slowly across the bottom below like golden searchlights. Everything moved. Nothing was completely still.

The whole forest breathed. "Oh," said Larry. He had four pages of notes, two diagrams, and 19 days of anticipation, and none of it had prepared him for this. "Oh," he said again, and meant it differently the second time. The life inside the kelp forest was staggering in its variety and density. A school of black rockfish moved through the midwater in a loose, shifting formation, all of them turning at precisely the same instant when a lingcod appeared below them, long, prehistoric-looking, its wide jaw full of the kind of teeth that indicate a fish with no uncertainty about its intentions.

The lingcod drifted up toward them, and the rockfish dispersed upward into the canopy, and the lingcod then lost interest and drifted back down. Tiny kelp greenlings darted between the stalks. They were brilliant copper and green. A painted greenling hovered perfectly still against a kelp blade, its coloring so precisely matched to the plant that Larry nearly missed it entirely and only noticed when it flicked its tail a tiny bit.

"Is that a fish pretending to be kelp?" he asked. "Painted greenlings use camouflage to wait for prey," said Captain Dave. "They position themselves against a blade and then go very still. Small invertebrates come past and don't see them until it's too late. Several species in the kelp forest use this strategy.

The forest provides the camouflage, and the forest gets nothing in return. But it doesn't matter because the forest provides camouflage to everything." On the bottom, a decorator crab moved slowly through the root-like structures that anchor each kelp plant to the rock. The crab was almost invisible because it had attached pieces of sponge, algae, even a small scrap of kelp blade to its shell using tiny hooked hairs on the shell, building itself a living disguise that moved and changed with it.

"That crab is wearing the forest," said Larry. "Decorator crabs maintain their camouflage," said Captain Dave. "When they shed their shell and grow a new one, they carefully detach their decorations from the old shell and reattach them to the new one. The disguise is a project they never stop working on." Then, from somewhere above the bright underside of the surface canopy, a sea otter dropped into the forest with the easy, unhurried movement of someone arriving home after a short errand.

It glanced at the submarine. It looked at its own front paws. Then it returned to the surface, gathered a long frond of kelp, wrapped it around itself, and closed its eyes. "It went to sleep," said Larry quietly. "Otters anchor themselves in kelp when they rest," said Captain Dave, equally quietly. "The kelp keeps them from drifting away on the current while they sleep.

Without the kelp forest, the otters would have nowhere safe to rest." "Why is kelp so important?" asked Larry as they drifted deeper into the forest. "Beyond being the most beautiful thing I've seen since we left French Creek." "The same reason old-growth rainforests are important on land," said Captain Dave.

"It's not just the kelp itself, it's what the kelp makes possible. Every species we've seen since we've entered the forest, the rockfish, the greenlings, the otter, the decorator crab, the lingcod, the urchins, they all depend on the kelp either directly or indirectly. The kelp provides structure, shelter, feeding grounds, nursery habitat for young fish, and hunting territory for larger predators.

Take away the kelp, you don't just lose the kelp, you lose the whole community." "Like a neighborhood," said Larry. "Like the whole town," said Captain Dave. "What threatens it?" "Sea urchins primarily. When their populations get out of balance, urchins eat the base of the kelp plant where it attaches to the rock.

Too many urchins and the kelp is consumed faster than it can grow. You end up with what scientists call an urchin barren. Bare rock, purple urchins covering everything, almost no other life. It's one of the most dramatic transformations in the ocean. From what you're seeing right now to nothing" "What keeps the urchins in check?"

"Sea otters. When the fur trade hunted sea otters nearly to extinction along the British Columbia coast in the 1700 and 1800s, urchin populations exploded across huge areas and the kelp forests disappeared. The reintroduction of sea otters to parts of the coast over the past 50 years has allowed kelp to return in places where it had been gone for a century."

Larry looked at the otter, still asleep in its kelp wrap above them, rocking gently in the slow movement of the water. The kelp allowed that small, whiskered animal to be vulnerable while it napped. "One species," Larry said softly. "One small sleeping species, and all of this," he gestured toward the kelp forest, "all of this follows from it."

"That's ecology," said Captain Dave. "Everything connected to everything else. Every piece matters." They stayed in the kelp forest for two full hours. Larry filled his clipboard completely, and had to go continue writing on the back of each page. Captain Dave spent 20 minutes photographing a juvenile china rockfish, copper-colored, and barely the length of a finger.

It had found a sheltered space between two stalks, and was using it as its entire world, hovering in the slight current, waiting to grow. It was time to go. On the way back up through the canopy, the light shifted, brighter as they rose, more golden, the afternoon sun now lower and more slanted through the water.

The kelp blades swayed above them in long, slow arcs. At the surface, the bull kelp floats bumped softly against the hull with a patient, repetitive knock. The sea otter woke, blinked, unwrapped itself from its kelp blanket, rolled onto its front, and dove with barely a ripple. "Do you think it knew we were there the entire time?"

asked Larry. "Otters are highly intelligent and very aware of their surroundings," said Captain Dave. "It knew." "It didn't seem to mind." "I think," said Captain Dave, starting the engine and turning toward French Creek, "I think that was exactly the point." The kelp forest fell away below them as they rose and moved, its canopy catching the late afternoon light from underneath, green and gold and enormous and completely alive, the way things are when they have been left alone long enough to become what they were always meant to be.

Larry looked at his pages of notes. He wrote one last line at the bottom of the final page. Always bigger than you think. Always more alive than you can imagine. Always. 

Eddie Van Haddock & The Rockfish: When the night falls softly, and stars light up the sky, Captain Dave tucks his crew in with a gentle lullaby. Dreams of whales and mermaids, of treasures lush and green, await each little sailor aboard the mellow submarine.

Fireside Books: There's exciting news for book lovers. Fireside Books in Parksville now has a second location in Port Alberni. The Bookwyrm. Used books are just five dollars or less. The Bookwyrm on the corner of Redford and Anderson opens seven days a week from ten to five. Fireside Books at 464 Island Highway East in Parksville is a book dragon's dream come true. Browse their extensive collections seven days a week. Order online at firesidebooks.ca and pick up at either location. Details available online. Ask about returning books for a book credit.