For many years derelict boats have washed ashore in Cadboro Bay. With the sandy sea floor and much of the bay exposed to the open water, it is common for boats with poor anchors to drift.
"It becomes a mess," said Eric Dahli, a founder of the Cadboro Bay Dead Boats Society. He described one situation a couple years ago when a boat washed ashore and began leaking diesel onto the beach.
Dahli is pushing for a solution. The dead boat society founder and former chair of the local residents association wants to get a license of occupation granted by the province to set up a field of buoys on the Oak Bay side to create a "campground" of sorts that would be managed by the local yacht club.
Cadboro Bay is split between two municipalities, Oak Bay and Saanich. The Saanich side is much larger and more exposed, but the Oak Bay side is protected by the yacht club's breakwater. Boats can drop an anchor on the safe side or the exposed side, but either way there can be problems.
"Often times some of the boats that take advantage of safe anchorage in Cadboro Bay, either short- or long-term, don't always abide by the rules of the Coast Guard or Fisheries and Oceans with regard to holding tanks, with regard to using the ocean as the garbage can," Dahli said.
This campground plan would provide buoys for boats at a nominal fee — enough to cover the costs of administering the program, which would likely be run by the yacht club — in exchange for abiding by rules for things like waste holding tanks.
"We all want to eliminate what has been known as the wild west in Cadboro Bay with boats in there that are not in good shape and often abandoned," Dahli said.
Dahli helped start the Cadboro Bay Dead Boats Society to clean up the mess from these boats when they end up running ashore and getting abandoned. Now he is looking for more proactive solutions.
For this plan to go into force, the provincial government and the local municipality will need to get on board. The web of jurisdictions are complicated, but essentially the province has some say over the sea floor and the district has some say over the water's surface.
So Dahli is now engaging with the Royal Victoria Yacht Club, local environmental groups, the District of Oak Bay, the Songhees Nation and the District of Oak Bay to get the ball rolling and create a plan to send to the province.
Oak Bay Mayor Kevin Murdoch said this is a priority for the district council, and a staff report is already in the works to lay out some of the options.
Once that is finished, Murdoch says there will likely be some engagement with various stakeholders to figure out what the different needs and opinions are. He also said the District of Saanich will need to be involved so they don't create a problem in one side of the bay by solving a problem in the other.
"We could, in effect, push people into the more exposed side," Murdoch said.
Murdoch is also concerned about problems in Oak Bay itself, as well as Cadboro Bay, and would likely be looking for a solution that could be applied to both places.
"We're looking at managing the entirety of our foreshore," he said.
Whatever does get done, there may be some detractors, but overall Dahli thinks that trying to rid the shoreline of derelict boats is one issue most people agree needs solving.
"There are some issues that are really tough to deal with, like dogs on the beach. That's really tough to deal with, because you got the leashers and the anti-leashers," he said. "But derelict boats — nobody likes them."
