4 ~ Wednesday, April 7, 1993 - North Shore News Era of laissez-faire conservatio Bob Hunter 4 f\ STRICTLY PERSONAL LREMEMBER when | used to po crabfishing on Indian Arm. One of my favorite places was a bay just north of the Village of Belcarra, on the eastern shore of the arm, south of the Hydio sta- tion. Out on my own boat or friends’ boats, drifting past the great stone edifice built tight against an enormous shield of cliff, 1 have often imagined escaping from some holocaust that had destroyed Vancouver by sailing up to the Station and taking it over. ft would make a fabulous fort. In the event of some total breakdown in authority, whoever commanded the Hydro station could command the arm, It is so formidably built, you stand a decent chance of fending off the mutant hordes when they come foraging for food later. Note that | always thought about this mysterious holocaust — whatever it was — as being some- thing that would (a) happen to the city, and (b) occur in the some- what distant future. And when} thought of fndian Arm, | thought of a magnificently clean, well-preserved, alinost pristine body of water, certunly compared to poor Howe Sound or Burrard tale. Up the arm, you might be able to revert toa hunter-and-gatherer phase and still survive, at feast a small tribe of you. [have spent many a soothing hour and day staring down into the inlet’s depths, not that you cun hope to see bottom except along the very cliff-edues and off- shore from a couple of marshy headlands. Jn the rippting sheets of light threading their way down into the blackness, you can glimpse jellyfish swishing along. Harbour seals let out long bisses as they otherwise silently break surface to eye you, The Blue Heron strides with absolute in- dependence through the air. Here, | can swin (in a wetsuit jacket at least, thank you) and not immediately taste an oil slick, and not have to worry too much about dioxins or furans, what with there being no pulp mills around. This is what I'd often do after we'd set the crab traps and Icft them altacher! to their bladders, driving the buat far enough away to make the crabs think it was safe to come oul again, It used to be that if you set your traps about a quarter of a mile out from the head of the peninsula near Belcarra, you almost always had a couple of big, healthy Dungeness crabs, above the 6.5-inch limit, within a couple of hours. Back then, there weren't too many of us out there. The big commercial crab-boats came through right up to the end of Burrard Inlet every once in a while, but they never stayed long. The pickings were toe chin, ftowas usually in the early even- ing when I'd set out with my wife and sometimes friends, plus bottle of wine and wetsuits, starting out from the foce dock. We'd set three craps and then head off to toitst the sunset. Coming back, we'd discover usually three or four, sometimes five — and one memorable time eight — Dungeness. Sometinies all but one ar two would have to be thrown — well, lowered gingerly -— back into the water, because they were (00 small, Generally, it was alinost guar- anteed that out of three traps over a couple of hours, you'd have plenty of fresh crab meat ta go with the satiad, I'tn harkening back to seven, cight and ning years ago. te ended for us in the summer of 1986, Our traps started disap- pearing. | actually went and replaced two of them, thinking | must have made some insane error in connecting the line to the cage. But no. After a while, there could be no doubt about it, Somebody was stealing them. Crab pot, bladder, line and, pre- sumably, crabs, Thad a bad feeling that a per- son who would stoop to stealing another man’s crab pots is not likely to be the sort of person who could be counted on to let the undersized ones go. { chased after a couple of boats that were suspiciously close to the place where my traps had disap- peared, but when we pulled alongside, it turned into a no- speak-English situation: lots of shrugs and shaking of heads, but mostly stony silence. What was I going to do? Storm on board and try to prove one of the crab pots was mine? The Mounties said there wasn’t NEWS photo Neil Lucente ED MUFFORD, an electrical engineer who helped design the ZEV (Zero Emission Vehicle) for BC Transit, shows how the fuel cell works. NV co. taps power source Ballard’s non-polluting fuel cell powers transit bus WHEN THOUSANDS of members of the international media gathered in Vancouver over the weekend to witness the first- ever Bill Clinton-Boris Yeltsin summit meeting hosted in the city, they also witnessed the work of a North Vancouver company that has become an industry feader in the area of non-polluting fuel cells. Ballard Power Systems has de- veloped a non-poiluting fuel cell for BC Transit. On Friday, members of the media on a_ bus Stanley Park. They rode in the world’s first transit bus powered by a hydrogen BC Transit took international tour around fuel cell. The fuel cell. which is made up of plates of graphite separated by a polymer membrane, converts hydrogen and oxygen into electric- ity, heat and water, which are its only byproducts. Thus far, it runs on hydrogen extracted from natural gas or methanol. Ballard's ultimate goal for the fuel cell is to have it run on hydrogen produced from water. Ballard recently won $1 million in financing from the Los Angeles-based South Coast Air Quality Management Authority to help fund Phase 2 of Ballard’s fuel cell program. The money will go towards producing a fuli-sized transit bus powered only by the North Van- couver company’s fuel cell. Ballard first began work: on the fuel cell in the mid-1980s. The federal and provincial gov- ernments are providing the bulk of the financing for the fuel cell technology. BC Transit chairman Eric Denhoff said the Crown corpora- tion is excited about working with Ballard on the fuel celi. Twenty-four Ballard hydrogen fuel cells supply the power for the prototype bus. The pure water gencrated from the fuel cell is stored in tanks and is re-cir- culated as a coolant. pe A A A A set LAY much they could do since crab pots itre mostly alike. The blad- ders tao, And, of course, suspicions and proof are two different things. Anybody could have stolen the traps. Back then, | didn't need a licence to go after crab. | was just a recreational crab fisherman, You still don’t need a licence. By 1994, you will. And J, for one, cheer the regulation, much as | hate extra levels of bureaucracy. Ljust wish the regulations had kicked in a lot sooner, The era of laissee-faire conser- vation is over, an obvious failure. {t's not just Boy Scouts out there after a few crabs any longer. J was wrong about the holocaust [used 10 imagine, thinking it would happen in the city. Au contraire, it's happening out in the natural world — and Indian Arm is still, just barely, part of that. The disappearance of the crabs is a part of a much larger disitster. And, gee, this is happening not very far into the future at all. re SPECIAL EVENT Sale includes all diamond rings, loose diamonds and diamond jeweiry - if ‘YOU have ot ever want arive a Mercedes-Benz... Leasing a 1993 Mercedes-Benz INDE Special Edition is now more affordable than ever. 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