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: It started with a bottle cap.

 Not a very interesting bottle cap either. It was faded orange, a little scratched, and it had been floating in the water long enough that something small and green was growing on one side of it. Larry spotted it first. He was doing his morning check of the Mellow Submarine's exterior, a job he took very seriously, which mostly involved walking slowly around the outside of the boat and looking at things.

When he noticed the bottle cap bobbing against the hull, he fished it out with one claw and held it up. "Captain Dave," he called. Captain Dave appeared in the hatchway with his coffee. "Morning, Larry. What have you got?" "A bottle cap." "Ah. It's been in the water a while." "Looks like it," said Captain Dave. He climbed down and took the cap from Larry, turning it over in his fingers.

The green growth on the back was algae, and the plastic itself had gone brittle and chalky around the edges, the way plastic looks when it's been tumbled by sun and salt and waves for a long time. "Where do you think it came from?" asked Larry. Captain Dave looked out across the harbour. It was early, and the water was flat and silver.

Somewhere out past the breakwater, a seal surfaced and then disappeared. "That," said Captain Dave, "is an excellent question." Larry straightened up. He knew that tone. That was the tone that meant they were going somewhere. "I'll start the engine," he said. They motored out of French Creek Harbour slowly, the Mellow Submarine leaving a small white wake in the calm morning water.

Captain Dave had the bottle cap sitting on the console in front of him, and he kept glancing at it the way you glance at a puzzle you haven't figured out yet. "Here's what we know," said Larry, who had found a clipboard and was writing things down because Larry believed very strongly that investigations required clipboards.

"One bottle cap, orange, plastic, has been in the water for some time." "Correct," said Captain Dave. "Here's what we don't know," continued Larry. "Where it came from, how long it's been out here, and how it ended up against our hull instead of somewhere else." "The current," said Captain Dave. "The wind, tides, they all move things."

"So the bottle cap was travelling," said Larry. "Everything in the ocean is travelling," said Captain Dave. "The question is where it started." They motored north, following the shoreline. The sun was getting higher now, burning the mist off the water. To the west, the mountains of Vancouver Island were dark green and enormous.

To the east, across the Strait of Georgia, the mainland mountains were dusted with snow at their peaks, even now in summer. It was a beautiful morning to be looking for garbage. They found more within 20 minutes. Not a lot. This wasn't a garbage dump or a disaster zone. But once you started looking, you noticed.

A fragment of blue plastic netting caught on a piece of kelp. A faded white foam cup, waterlogged and breaking apart. A tangle of clear plastic wrap turning slowly in a small eddy near the rocks. Larry wrote each one down. "The netting is the bad one," said Captain Dave, pulling alongside and carefully retrieving it with a long-handled hook.

"Marine animals get caught in netting. Sea lions, sea birds, fish, even whales sometimes." "How does a whale get caught in netting?" asked Larry. "Well, the net wraps around a flipper or around the jaw. The animal can't feed properly, can't swim properly. It's one of the most serious problems in the ocean." Larry looked at the tangle of blue netting in the boat's collection bucket.

It didn't look dangerous. It looked like nothing, like something you'd forget about instantly if you saw it on a shelf. But here, out on the water, it was a trap waiting to spring. Larry wrote, "Netting equals serious hazard" on his clipboard. They had been out for about an hour when they spotted the seagull.

It was sitting low in the water near a cluster of rocks, and it wasn't moving the way seagulls usually do, swooping, calling, arguing loudly with other seagulls about food, or doing any of the busy, opinionated things that seagulls are famous for. It was just sitting. Captain Dave cut the engine, and they drifted closer.

"Something's wrong," said Larry quietly. "Yes," said Captain Dave. He reached for the binoculars. The seagull was breathing, its eyes were open, but it wasn't moving the way a healthy bird moves, alert, quick, ready to take off at any moment. It was slow, heavy looking. "Can we help it?" asked Larry. "Let me call it in," said Captain Dave.

He reached for the radio and contacted the Parksville-Qualicum Beach Wildlife Recovery Centre, describing the bird's location and condition. The woman on the other end of the radio asked several calm, efficient questions: was the bird responsive? Could they see any obvious injuries? Was it alone? And then gave them instructions for keeping the bird calm until someone could come by boat to retrieve it.

While they waited, Larry sat near the bow and watched the bird. "Do you think it ate plastic?" he asked. "Possibly," said Captain Dave. "It's one of the most common causes of illness in seabirds. They see small pieces of plastic floating on the surface, they think it's food. Their stomachs fill up with plastic instead of fish.

They feel full, so they stop eating, but they're not getting any nutrition." Larry looked at the bottle cap still sitting on the console. "So something like that," he said. "Something exactly like that," said Captain Dave. "A seagull might swallow dozens of small pieces, bits of bags, broken-off fragments of bottles, foam beads, things that look from above the water like small fish or fish eggs."

Larry was quiet for a moment. "That's a terrible trick." "Oh, it's not a trick," said Captain Dave. "The plastic isn't trying to fool anyone. We put it there, and it stays there, and the animals, well, they can't tell the difference." Larry wrote on his clipboard, "We put it there." He underlined it twice. The recovery boat arrived within the hour, a small rigid inflatable with two volunteers in gloves with a carrier.

They retrieved the seagull efficiently and gently, and the lead volunteer, a young woman named Daria, paused to talk with Captain Dave and Larry before heading back. "We see this a lot," she said, looking in the collection bucket with the netting and the other pieces they had gathered. "Especially in summer when there's more boat traffic and more people on the beaches."

"Where does it all come from?" asked Larry. Daria leaned on the side of the inflatable. "Everywhere. Some of it falls off boats, gear, packaging, things that blow overboard. Some of it comes from beaches. People leave things, or the wind takes bags and cups. Some of it comes from rivers washed down from inland, and some of it has been in the ocean so long it's broken into tiny pieces. 

We call those microplastics." "Micro," said Larry. "That means tiny." "Very tiny," said Daria. "Too small to see some of them. They get eaten by zooplankton, which get eaten by small fish, which then get eaten by bigger fish, which get eaten by seals and orcas and humans." Larry's antennae went very still. "Humans eat microplastics?"

"We do," said Daria. "Not on purpose, but yes." Larry looked at Captain Dave. "I told you this was serious," said Captain Dave. After the recovery boat headed back toward Parksville, Captain Dave and Larry sat with the engine off, drifting slowly in the morning sunshine. It felt different now, somehow. The water, still beautiful, still enormous and blue and full of life, but also full of things that shouldn't be there, things too small to see, things that have been travelling for years.

"I feel a bit sad," said Larry. "That's a reasonable response," said Captain Dave. "But also," said Larry, looking at his clipboard, "I want to do something." "Also a reasonable response." "We collected the netting," said Larry, "and the foam cup and the plastic wrap. That's something." "It is." "And we got the seagull some help. 

"We did." "And now we know more than we did this morning," said Larry. He looked at the bottle cap on the console. "We know where things like this end up." "We know," said Captain Dave. Larry picked up the bottle cap. He turned it over in his claw, looking at the faded orange plastic, the brittle edges, the small patch of algae still clinging to the back.

"Someone put a drink in a bottle," he said slowly, "and when they were finished, they didn't put the cap somewhere safe. Maybe they dropped it. Maybe they didn't think about it. Maybe they thought it was too small to matter." "Too small to matter," repeated Captain Dave. "That's the puzzle, isn't it? A lot of things that end up in the ocean start as something small."

"One cap," said Larry. "One cap," said Captain Dave. "One bag, one piece of netting, one foam cup. Multiply that by millions of people, millions of days, and you get..." "The ocean we have," said Larry. They were both quiet for a moment. "But it also works the other way," said Larry. Captain Dave looked at him. "One person picks something up," said Larry, "and another person, and another.

Millions of people, millions of days." He put the bottle cap carefully into the collection bucket with the other pieces. "The math goes both ways." Captain Dave smiled. It was a slow smile, the kind that meant something had landed just right. "First Mate Larry," he said, "that is the best thing I have heard all week. 

They spent another hour working slowly back toward French Creek, keeping their eyes on the water. They didn't find anything dramatic, no more struggling birds, no enormous nets, just the small, easy-to-miss things. A shred of plastic bag draped over a rock, three foam beads caught in a tangle of eelgrass near the shallows, a plastic straw faded almost white.

Each one went into the bucket. Each one was one less thing in the water. It wasn't enough to fix the ocean, they both knew that, but it was enough for a Tuesday morning, and that was something. Back at the dock, Captain Dave rinsed the collection bucket and sorted the pieces into the proper bins at the harbour's waste station, recycling where possible, garbage where not.

The blue netting went into a special bin for fishing gear, which would be sent to a facility that recycled old marine equipment into new products. Larry watched this with great interest and wrote it all down. "You know what we should do?" said Larry. "Tell me," said Captain Dave. "We should leave a collection bucket on the dock with a sign so other people can add to it when they're out on the water."

Captain Dave considered this. "A community bucket." "Exactly," said Larry, "because we can't be everywhere, but other people can." "I know where there's a spare bucket," said Captain Dave. "I'll make the sign," said Larry. That evening, a hand-lettered sign appeared on the main dock at French Creek Harbour. It was written in Larry's surprisingly tidy handwriting.

He had very precise claws, and it read, "Found something that shouldn't be in the ocean? Pop it in here. Every piece counts." Signed, Captain Dave and Larry, Mellow Submarine. By the next morning, someone had already added a plastic bag and two bottle caps. Larry checked the bucket first thing, before coffee, before anything 

He wrote it down on his clipboard. Then he went and put the kettle on.

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.