Thursday, April 30, 2009

You want a what where?


Living where I do and fishing as a hobby, I think I've cultivated a reasonable understanding of the locale. Tides, wildlife etc.

There is a company from Alberta which wants to develop the Cable Bay area, which covers a piece of currently unmanaged woodland from the Cable Bay Trail in the West, to the Eastern shore of Dodd Narrows across from Mudge Island. No problem so far. New developments going in all the time around Nanaimo. It's a growing place, even with the world economy in the state it's in.

One of the things I've heard is that the company wanting to develop the area want to put a Marina in the area. My brow furrows in perplexity because the narrow channels in the area make for some quite tricky navigation at certain states of the tide. I know this from trying to fish in Dodd Narrows, which at anything but the brief period of slack water is troublesome to say the least. Mostly the tidal flow jogs along at around four to six knots (just under 7mph or slightly over 11km/h). During neaps and springs the tidal flows are reputed to reach sixteen and a half knots (Just Under 19mph and around 30.5km/h) in the neck of the narrows, which is well above the 10km/h coastal speed limit in BC. Certain types of craft can zip through without noticing if they give it some serious welly. On the other hand, trying navigate against the tide, or even with it in say a sail boat with a relatively small auxiliary engine at the wrong time can prove at best embarrassing, or at worst, alarming, although no one has been killed down there for quite some time. At times (about twice a day) the Narrows look like a set of white water rapids. Even further down where we live, some rather ugly looking vortexes form and you can hear the tide as a sort of background roar.

Local opinion goes that the developers of Cable Bay will try to 'flip' or sell on the land when permission to develop has finally been approved. I have no axe to grind one way or another, but my own thoughts are; they want to put a Marina where?

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