Jonny Williams squeezes into a soaped-up wetsuit near the base of British Columbia’s Tantalus Range, a series of 2,000-plus-metre peaks that give rise to the region’s moniker, Sea to Sky. The water he slips into is like glass, an unexpected gift in a glacier-etched fjord known to funnel high winds. As he kicks his fins along the shoreline, jets of seawater sparkle as they meet the sun. A while later, he bobs back up and yells, “I almost smoked my head!” With plankton in bloom, visibility in the shallow water is an arm’s-length ahead, and rocks seem to come out of nowhere.
It’s Tem Lhawt’ [tem thlout], the time of the herring, in the heart of Sḵwx̱wú7mesh [skw-ho-mish] homelands. In early spring, the small team of young citizen scientists Williams belongs to fires up the outboard engine and zips an aluminum boat to locations along the steep western wall of these shores. At each stop, someone suits up, dives in, and scans every nook, searching for signs of a population of herring that Fisheries and Oceans Canada deems too peripheral for regular monitoring.
