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 the 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: Captain Dave had been checking the tide tables for three days. Not because he was worried exactly, but because Dodd Narrows was the kind of place that demanded respect, and Captain Dave believed strongly in respecting things that could flip you upside down if you were not paying close attention.
“The window is eleven minutes,” he said, tapping the chart spread across the galley table.
“Eleven minutes?” repeated Larry the Lobster, looking over his shoulder at the chart. “That's not very long.”
“It's plenty if you don't waste it.”
“And if you do waste it?”
Captain Dave pointed to a small notation on the chart. It said, “Maximum current, nine knots.”
“Then we wait six hours for the next slack tide. Six hours of sitting in the boat, drinking tea, and watching the water do things we can't do anything about.”
“I see,” said Larry. He looked at the notation again. “Nine knots is very fast for water.”
“Fast enough to spin the submarine sideways and push us into the rocks before we could correct it. Dodd Narrows has caught out people who knew better than to underestimate it: commercial fishermen, tugs, sailboats. The Narrows doesn't care who you are or how experienced you think you are. The water runs, and if you're in the way, you're in trouble.”
Larry looked at the chart, then he looked at the clock. Then he looked at his clipboard, which he had brought because he considered navigational passages the kind of thing that required documentation. He uncapped his pen.
“I'll be ready,” he said.
Dodd Narrows sits between Vancouver Island and Mudge Island, just south of Nanaimo. It is one of those places that looks perfectly calm on a map: a thin blue line between two green shapes. But it is absolutely not calm in real life. When the tide is running, the water squeezes through the narrow gap and builds into standing waves, whirlpools, and rushing currents that can carry a small vessel sideways before the skipper has time to say anything useful. The narrowest point of the passage is about seventy-five metres wide.
The water doesn't know this. It doesn't care. It tries to pour through anyway, billions of litres of ocean moved by the gravitational pull of the moon, and what comes out the other side is fast and loud and full of opinions about where everything else should go.
But at slack water, the brief pause between tides when the ocean takes a breath before pulling in the other direction, Dodd Narrows becomes still and navigable and frankly beautiful. The rock walls drip with sea stars. Kelp sways in the last of the current. A heron stands on a ledge and watches everything with long, patient indifference. The whole passage sits quiet like a held breath, waiting. That was the eleven-minute window.
“Fifteen minutes to slack,” said Captain Dave, guiding the Mellow Submarine out of Nanaimo Harbour and south along the coast.
The morning was overcast, the water grey-green, and a pair of bald eagles were sitting in a dead snag above the tree line, watching everything with their usual air of mild superiority.
“Do the eagles use the Narrows?” asked Larry.
“They wait above it,” said Captain Dave. “The current stirs up the water and brings stunned or disoriented fish close to the surface. The eagles figured that out a long time ago. They position themselves upstream, and they wait. Then slack comes, and the fish come up, and the eagles move.”
“Working with the tide instead of against it,” said Larry. “That's the only sensible approach. What happens in the Narrows when the current is running full?” he asked, pen ready.
“The water piles up on the incoming side, then accelerates through the gap, like squeezing a garden hose. Same amount of water, smaller opening, so it moves faster and with more force. You get standing waves that can be a metre high in strong tides, eddies that spin off the rock walls, places where the surface current runs one direction and the current two metres below runs the opposite way.”
“My antenna would go completely mad in that,” said Larry.
“You'd be the first to know something was wrong,” said Captain Dave, “which is why you're going to stand at the bow and tell me what you feel when we approach. Lobster antenna detect current and pressure changes that instruments sometimes miss.”
Larry stood very straight and raised his antenna. He looked quite official.
They arrived at the south entrance to Dodd Narrows with four minutes to spare. Captain Dave brought the engine to a near idle, and they drifted, reading the water. It was still churning. Not dramatically, no great standing waves yet, but there was a definite muscular movement to it, a sense of purpose, like a river that knew exactly where it was going and was not interested in being interrupted or delayed.
“Not yet,” said Captain Dave.
Larry felt the current as a faint pressure, even and steady across both antennae, still flowing, still running one way.
“Not yet,” he confirmed.
They waited. A great blue heron flew overhead, its wings beating slow and prehistoric, heading south without any apparent concern about tides or schedules. A harbour porpoise surfaced near the narrows entrance, considered the submarine, and then dove.
“Do porpoises navigate the narrows?” asked Larry.
“At slack, yes. They time it the same way we do.”
“How do they know when slack is? They don't have tide tables.”
“They have something better,” said Captain Dave. “Accumulated knowledge passed down through generations. They know this water the way you know the inside of the Mellow Submarine: the feel of it, the sound of it, the way it changes. That kind of knowledge takes longer to learn than reading a chart, but it's harder to lose.”
The current eased, the surface flattened. The movement in the water went from purposeful to quiet, from running to resting. It happened gradually, and then completely, like a held breath finally released.
“Now,” said Larry.
“Now,” agreed Captain Dave, and pushed the throttle forward.
The passage took nine minutes: nine minutes of glassy green water, vertical rock walls on either side draped in orange and purple sea stars, bull kelp swaying in the last gentle movement of the tide. A harbour seal surfaced just ahead of them, looked at the submarine with the bored expression seals always wear, and dove. A sunflower sea star walked along the bottom on what appeared to be a hundred tiny feet. A purple shore crab pressed itself into a crevice as they passed over. Larry wrote everything down.
“That was wonderful,” he said when they came out the other side into the calmer waters of the Stuart Channel.
“Wait,” said Captain Dave. “We haven't got to the good part yet.”
He cut the engine and let them drift, then reached for the underwater camera mounted on the hull. On the small screen in the cabin, the sea floor came into view, rocky, covered in anemones and urchins and bright orange sponges, everything waving slowly in the last of the tidal movement. And fish, dozens of them, settled in among the rocks like they had been there for years, which, as Captain Dave was about to explain, some of them really had.
“Those are yelloweye rockfish,” he said, pointing to a cluster of large orange-red fish resting near the bottom. “See their distinctive yellow eyes? They give the species its name. They're one of the longest-lived fish in the ocean.”
“They look old,” said Larry.
“That's because they are. Yelloweye rockfish can live to be 120 years old. Some scientists believe certain individuals may live even longer than that.”
Larry's antenna went straight up. “120?”
“Some of the fish you're looking at right now were alive before most of the towns on Vancouver Island existed. They were here through the last century of change on this coast: the canneries, the clear cuts, the ferry routes, and all of it, and they're still here, sitting on the bottom being rockfish, which is all they have ever done and all they intend to keep doing.”
Larry stared at the screen. The fish didn't move. They didn't blink. They simply existed with the unhurried confidence of creatures that have been doing this longer than almost anything else in the province.
“How?” he finally asked. “How do they live so long?”
“Patience and slowness,” said Captain Dave. “They grow very slowly. A yelloweye might take 20 years to reach the size you're looking at. Their metabolism is slow. Their heart rate is slow. Their movements are slow. They find a good rocky spot, a shelf, a crevice, a particular boulder, and they stay there for decades. They don't waste energy. They don't take risks they don't have to take. They outlast everything around them simply by persisting.”
“Like the opposite of a tide,” said Larry.
“Exactly like the opposite of a tide. The Narrows rushes through in nine minutes. The rockfish have been sitting on that boulder for fifty years.”
They spent an hour drifting slowly above the rocky bottom south of the narrows, watching the rockfish do not very much, which sounds boring, but wasn't, somehow. There was something genuinely calming about creatures that had perfected the art of staying put and surviving through patience rather than speed.
A quillback rockfish, dark, mottled black and orange, with a dramatically spiny dorsal fin, shifted position by about six centimetres. Larry wrote this down as if it mattered, because in the context of a quillback rockfish, it did.
“Do they ever move quickly?” he asked.
“When they have to. A predator comes, a ling cod, a large seal, and a rockfish can move fast if it needs to. But it doesn't practice for the sake of it. Every calorie is conserved. Every movement is purposeful.”
“Conservation,” said Larry. “In the most literal sense.”
Larry looked at the rockfish on the screen. The fish appeared, possibly, to look back.
“I think I could learn from them,” said Larry.
“Most of us could,” said Captain Dave.
“Larry the Lobster, patient, still, living to one hundred and twenty,” Larry said, trying the idea on.
“You're already impressively old,” said Captain Dave.
“I prefer well-seasoned,” said Larry.
On the way back through the Narrows, the tide now running the other direction, their window replaced by another six-hour wait if they'd miscalculated, Captain Dave told Larry about the Snuneymuxw people, the Coast Salish Nation whose territory encompasses these waters around Nanaimo. He spoke of how their ancestors had navigated these same narrows in cedar dugout canoes for thousands of years before any chart existed, reading the water by the texture of its surface, the lie of the kelp, the behaviour of birds, the feel of the current. Knowledge accumulated over generations and passed down carefully, more precise in many ways than what any instrument could tell you.
“Some of the early settlers learned from the First Nations peoples,” said Captain Dave. “They were taught to read the Narrows. The ones who didn't learn, or who didn't listen, sometimes came to grief here.”
“The water doesn't make any exceptions,” said Larry.
“Nine knots for everyone,” agreed Captain Dave.
They passed back through the Narrows at the slack, the tide balanced between directions, the surface quiet, the rock walls glowing amber in the afternoon light, and out into the wider water of the Georgia Strait. Nanaimo was ahead, the harbour lights beginning to flicker on in the early dusk.
Below them, somewhere in the rocky dark of the channel, a yelloweye rockfish settled a little more comfortably against its favourite boulder. It had occupied that exact spot, more or less, since before Captain Dave's grandfather was born. It was not going anywhere.
Then the Narrows began to run again.
Larry wrote a final note on the back of his tide table. It read: “Some things are worth waiting eleven minutes for.”
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.
