From the Archipelago: Rain, Rain, and More Rain

December 2001 - January 2002

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
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By Alexandra Morton

With their blowholes open like potholes to the pelting rain, how do whales breathe without getting lungfuls of water? Photo: Alexandra Morton

Rain on the hydrophone, rain on the roof, rain, rain and more rain down my back. It's starting to feel like "forty days and forty nights." I thought six inches in August was wet, but we're over eleven inches for October with one more week to go. You have to bail out your boat twice a day just to stay afloat.

"Felt like I was under a waterfall," quipped neighbour Bill Proctor describing his dash to get his boat away from the dock in a fierce westerly gale last night. We had an inch and a half that night. Then the wind switched to southeast and it really began to rain.

You can usually tell a local from a tourist because locals never wear raingear. I don't know why-I guess you just get used to being damp. But this fall I broke down and bought a raincoat. Damp is fine; soaked isn't. It's been raining so hard the children have to wear life jackets just to cross the puddles. I saw cormorants trying to "dry" their wings in a mere shower, and my chickens are demanding roomservice. When I open the door to their coop they stare at me in disbelief, "What do you think we are, ducks?"

The log-salvagers have their dog-lines coiled and ready, because they know, with all this water coming down the hills, there will be a slide soon. Our collecting of salmon broodstock was halted as the creeks jumped their banks to become raging rivers. And the ocean is clear red, the colour of water percolated down hemlock and cedar sheathed slopes.

When I arrived in Echo Bay in October, 18 years ago, it was raining, but not like this. In fact, I know now that I began my watch in a dry spell. This is going to be interesting, because rain is what built this coast to its historic abundance. Rain allowed First Nation people to live here in higher density than any other hunting, gathering society anywhere else on earth. While the precipitation looks overwhelming to me, the ecosystem has clearly seen it before and is taking advantage. Young trees have 18 inches of new growth, pink salmon, which usually spawn near the estuaries have been sighted farther up the watersheds than any have been seen before, and toad abundance in my mud garden is high.

If this keeps up the sealice crawling over the farm salmon will not survive the freshwater lens which is building, giving next spring's young salmon a clean break into their ocean phase. The deer population will get some relief from hunting pressure as only the most determined hunters are wading into the forests this fall. And pesticide residues on logging cutblocks will be washed away with enough dilution to hopefully lessen the effect. Enough rain could cleanse away some of our degradation of this wet paradise.

I used to encourage soggy-spirited neighbours by reminding them that all the water falling from the sky is good for the fish, but I've stopped doing that. Our floats, usually dry and bouyant as corks from a summer of sun, are going into this winter too wet and heavy-some will sink. As the seaplane dispatcher, said, "I don't think I got enough sun this summer to make it through the winter," and many agree. The salt-loving dolphins can't even come in here for long. Heavy rain has always driven them out and now they only dash in for brief snacks on the still abundant sand lance, then streak off to the west.

Diverse species of minute phytoplankton try to bloom during the few breaks of a dry day or two. The spiny Chaetoceros, damaging to fish gills, luminous noctiluca, tiny spaceship-like Protoperidinium, amber necklace Thalassiosira and deadly Heterosigma spring miraculously to life out of nowhere. A cosmos in a droplet, but they cannot sustain themselves when the rain begins to fall again. While stained red, the water has become as translucent as a January sea, making apparent the intimate marriage between sun and plankton.

It has rained so hard this fall, I never heard the annual fly-by of the southern migration by sandhill cranes. I thought I heard whales calling one night but couldn't be sure over the roar of a billion drops of water all crashing to the sea at once. How do whales breathe in rain, with their blowholes open like potholes to the pelting water -does the outward blast of their exhalation dry a pocket of air for one nanosecond? Or do they cough the water out? I do not know.

Our solar panels are only getting washed this fall. It makes a person want to invent 'rain panels', where each strike of H2O would spark a surge of energy that could be stored in a battery.

I can hear some of you saying "all right already, enough about the weather," but this is more than weather, it may be a regime shift-and to anyone studying earth's natural workings, that's exciting. Anomaly or not? That is the question I will get to observe. And without TV, movies or a mall, I find this fascinating. Depraved-perhaps. Wet-definitely. But happily so.

Oh, and if you come paddling here, be sure to bring a spare bailer.

© Alexandra Morton is a marine mammal scientist and writer in the Broughton Archipelago.

Email: wildorca@island.net