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Pacific Northwest

Garbage washed up on the beach

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We hope you learn a lot for this video about the garbage you have been finding.
What are things you can do to help keep plastics and other garbage out of the oceans?

Limited battery power, what should we do?

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We would like to thank all of the students that have been sending in their suggestions for solving our dilemmas over the last three weeks. We take your suggestions to heart and we are sorry that some of your suggestions have not been posted on the website for everyone to see. We are working on fixing this problem and we want to let you know that we have received your comments.

I want to take a few minutes to explain how we have solved some of our dilemmas based on your feedback.

Week 1: Water

We have been conserving drinking water by using as little as possible to wash dishes and cooking of pasta with just enough water so that we do not have to drain water when the pasta is done. We have also started collecting rainwater using our tarp and a small bucket. Thanks for the great suggestions.

Week 2: Collecting Water Samples

We have started collecting water samples and we have decided to collect them 5 minutes after leaving camp each morning and then at 2 hour intervals after that if we are collecting more than one sample in the same day. Thank you for all of your great suggestions.

Week 3: Garbage

We have been eating fish, crabs, and other seafood when we can. We will try to buy food in bulk and in larger quantities when possible to reduce trash, and we have started collecting all of our trash in ziplock bags so that we can recycle it, or dispose of none burnable garbage when we get to Port Hardy, the next town along our route!

This week’s dilemma: Limited battery power.

4_24_10_unload This week we will leave Port Hardy and head into one of the more remote sections of our journey to the Arctic Ocean. So far we have been able to find a cabin, campground, or small town along our route every 4 or 5 days to recharge our batteries. Now we may not be able to recharge four electronics or a couple of weeks. We will use solar panels to suppliment our battery power, but if it is cloudy we could run out of power before Bella Bella, the next town along our route. If we start running out of power what should we do? Are there certain types of content we should focus on sending you? Text and photos do not take as much power to produce as podcasts and videos. Do you have suggestions for how we might be able to conserve power?

Finding garbage and reducing our own impact

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garbage-1During last week’s Cast Your Vote you voted for us to document some of the garbage we find along the way.  At first this seemed like a challenge.  After all, this is still quite a beautiful and wild place.  On closer look, we realized that it is not very hard to find garbage on the beaches and in the water.  Dave’s video documents our biggest find so far.  Be sure to watch that to find out about all the plastic, styrofoam, and debris we found washed up at one of our recent campsites in Johnstone Strait.

Here is a list of garbage we found at that campsite:

garbage-2 styrofoam bits—above the high tide line there was a layer of these bits about a foot thick.

3 plastic water bottles

2 plastic fuel bottles

1 Croc (size 13)

1 bumper for a boat

1 propane tank

1 aerosol can

1 shampoo bottle

4 lighters

1 giant block of styrofoam (that John used as a tent platform)

several pieces of plastic rope

plastic bags- to many to count

We have also been trying hard to reduce the amount of garbage that we produce.  One way to do this is eating locally raised food.  This is helpful in two ways.  If we eat food that is grown nearby, fewer fossil fuels are burned in transporting the food to us and the food is not packaged in plastics.  Now, when I say locally raised, I am talking about food from the ocean.  That’s right.  There is an abundance of food available to us if we just know how to look for it and collect it.

5_14_10Lingcod Dave has taken up fishing.  After eating several Lingcod, we realize that this tastes way better than canned tuna.  Also, it is not caught far away, canned, and then shipped to a town near us.  Instead, Dave drops a fishing line in the water and if he is in the right spot, he catches dinner.

Oysters, clams, and mussels are also available in the intertidal zone.  To harvest them, we just have to go for a walk in the intertidal zone and pry them off of rocks.

Crabs and prawns are more difficult for us to get on our own.  We were fortunate enough to meet two people who shared their catch with us.  The crabs and prawns require the use of traps, which are too big for us to transport in our kayaks.5_11_10DaveShrimp

A few days ago, when we were in Shoal Bay, we had the pleasure of a seafood feast.  Locally caught prawns, crab, and oysters were on the menu.  The meal was amazing. It not only tasted good, but we were glad to eat food that was harvested locally in a sustainable way.

We were hoping that you might be able to find out about more foods that come from the ocean.  Do you have any recommendations for us?

Download this week's student response worksheet

Hands-on Kayak Fishin'

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DaveFish1 We pulled into the Lund, BC just in time for lunch yesterday. This funky end of the road town is nestled on southern end of Desolation Sound, which is a kayaker's paradise. We stopped at the marina for lunch and a look around and were greeted by 4 young Canadians who had just returned from 6 days of blissful exploration in the maze of islands to the north.

They told us about how wonderful their trip had been, how many fish they caught, and how many oysters they had eaten. When we told them we did not have a fishing pole, they ran to their car and came back a few minutes later with a hand line. They had caught dozens of fish with it, and insisted that we take it along, so I stuffed it in my hatch, purchased a fishing license, and said goodbye to our new friends.

DaveFish2 Desolation Sounds is just as they described, snow capped mountains dropping straight into narrow passage ways. I honestly do not think I have ever seen a place more beautiful, but I am pretty sure I will feel the same way about many places we encounter over the next 3 years.

This morning Amy stopped paddling for a few minutes so, I grabbed the hand line and dropped the weight over the side, feeding out line until the weight was on the bottom about 40 feet below. I jigged the rig up and down like I had been instructed and wham! Less than a minute later a fish had latched on to my line. Hand over hand I pulled the fish up. This was my first experience with a hand line and by the end of the day I had landed 7 fish-- one Lingcod and six Rockfish.

DaveFish3 I have always found fishing from a kayak with a fishing pole to be impractical on an extended trip. Poles are hard to store and hard to troll with unless you have a special rod holder. The hand line is small and easy to store, plus it is easy to troll with.

After one day of hand line use, I am far from an expert and would appreciate any tips or tricks you can share with me, but for now I am hooked on hand lines and plan to add one to my kayak camping gear list.