Life in the sanctuary zone
By Tom Wolff
Shards of morning light pierce the surface of the water, reflecting and refracting across the shallow sea floor. Seaweed sways lazily as waves roll over into the lagoon and the massive schools of luderick, bream, trevally and mullet appear to be in a trance-like state. A stingray suddenly explodes from beneath its sand-carpeted hiding place and shoots off into the distance, startling me in the process and pulling me out of my own reverie. I’ve been coming to this place for over twenty years – first as a surfer and later as fisherman & diver – and I’ve seen it change in ways I never thought possible.
It’s funny how one conversation can cause a tectonic shift in your understanding of a place; how a truth that lies just below the surface can be swept up and thrust into the air like an osprey cruising off with a fresh mullet. I was standing in the carpark a few months before that early morning snorkel, still dripping wet, when a car rolled in next to mine.
“Many fish out there today?” asks the older woman seated in the car, her eyes fixed on the horizon with a kind of knowing.
“Heaps. Saw a few octopus too,” I respond
“You know it’s a fish trap, right?” she says, nodding in the direction of the lagoon “Our Old People made it.”
“Nah, I didn’t know that,” I say, having my own private lightbulb moment
“Sounds like it still works,” says the woman, laughing.
“Sure does.”
When I first started coming to this place to surf as a teenager I rarely looked below the surface. To us surf-intoxicated groms the lagoon represented an obstacle to pass on our way to catch waves. We’d scamper across the barnacle encrusted rocks, being as careful as we could not to step on blue-ringed octopus – a fear mostly unwarranted because I only ever saw one with my own eyes – on our way out the back in search of tubes and uncrowded waves. It was where I cut my teeth in the ocean. Learning ever-so-slowly, through endless trial and error, to read sets, tides, winds and ultimately waves.
The ocean can be a harsh teacher sometimes but it never really comes as a surprise. I think what I learnt in those early years was never to be complacent. Oh, and don’t turn your back on the ocean.
Eventually I left this place but I rarely strayed far from the sea. Over those years I’d learn about ecology and ecosystems, more through observation than research, and how the environment we live in is more fragile than we care to remember sometimes. I found myself on the other side of the world, yet connected by the same vast ocean, when the reality hit home like a punch in the face. During a bicycle trip where I traversed the western coast of the Americas, in its symbiotic relationship with the eastern Pacific ocean, I was suddenly island hopping through British Colombia and in-search of a way south. As fate would have it, the answer to my questions down at the marina was an old salmon fisherman also named Tom.
Tom & I spent a week travelling south in his beautiful old fishing boat crafted of majestic timber from the Pacific Northwest’s breathtaking forests. A day of cleaning fish for Tom’s freezer in exchange for a week-long trip through the inside passage. The commercial season had finished for the year and Tom was heading back home to see his wife and slow down a little. How was I to know he’d been teaching a course on salmon ecosystems at the University of British Colombia on and off for years? Tom wasn’t of the academic variety. He was a hardened old sea-dog that could be grumpy at times. But his intimate understanding of what had caused the decline of salmon populations in Pacific Northwest meant he knew what it was to see the consequences of habitat destruction. It happened before his eyes.
When the salmon stopped running the way they used to, people started to blame the fisherman. “You’re taking too much” they’d say, before going home to cook dinner with tins of salmon from the supermarket, “you’ve overfished them.”
Tom tried to explain his hunch about what he thought was causing the salmon’s regression, looking up at the bald hillsides where once there were towering giants of cedar, hemlock spruce & fir. Surely all these clearfell forests are having an impact, he thought. And as s it turns out he was right. Because when the forests were clearfelled the soil came loose. It poured down into the streams and smothered precious salmon eggs. The streams, who now had no tree canopy to help regulate their temperature, started getting hotter. And the bears, who would’ve previously stomped off into the forest carrying their latest catch, all the while dropping nutrients into the forest as they went, were nowhere to be seen. Studies now show that up to 50% of nitrogen contained in trees comes directly from salmon. It’s no wonder those forests are so damn big. The ones that are left, that is.
As Tom taught me, in bits and pieces over that week that felt like a month: habitat was the problem, not overfishing. He helped me understand by explaining to me that although the Alaskan salmon fleet further north was bigger than ever, the salmon were experiencing record runs. Those vast areas of wild land mostly beyond the grasp of the modern human project were paying dividends for people thousands of kilometres away, as they cracked open their own tin of salmon. Protect habitat, manage it properly and watch what happens next.
Back on the eastern coast of Australia, not far from where the first rays of sun hit the Australian mainland, and I can see what’s happened in those twenty years since I first paddled out here. Now, on smaller days, I might just slide on the fins instead of a legrope.
I’ll sink below and be reminded of a world that operates in tandem with my own; one that is innately intertwined and upon whose future my life depends.
It’s an easy-stress reliever to float amongst the underworld and marvel at how weird and wonderful their lives are, much like my own. When we start seeing all these creatures as kin, and not just as food, it changes our relationship with them. It doesn’t mean we stop eating or killing sea creatures to sustain us but it leads us to take only what we need and no more; to ensure healthy populations of all life on earth. Indigenous custodians across the world have known this for eons but somewhere along the line we lost sight of that. We need to get it back again. And I believe we are.
The creation of that sanctuary zone was thanks to the tireless work of a relatively small group of people. Part of a much larger series of areas scattered up and down the coast where I live. Decisions driven by locals and made by governments not so long ago has helped to alter the course of our future and safeguarded a nursery that will keep providing fish given we’re respectful and only take what we need.
I feel privileged to watch that process of regeneration take place over a couple of decades. Once the fish came back, so did the octopus. And eventually the seagrasses and seaweeds returned in great numbers. People often discredit the intelligence of some marine creatures, but when you visit a place where they’re no longer being shot at with spears or jagged around with hooks, it’s pretty easy to see how relaxed they all are.
This afternoon I might go down and have a fish myself, hoping – unsuccessfully no doubt – to catch us some dinner. And if I’m lucky enough to hook-up a decent fish I’ll do my best to try and honour its life before I end it. Life in the sanctuary zone taught me that.