When the Gorge Stopped Turning Silver
Herring, Camossung, the broken Narrows and a restoration that was never finished
There was a time when the Pacific herring returned to the Gorge Waterway in numbers large enough to change the colour of the water.
The schools moved beneath Craigflower Bridge and through Portage Inlet like a living tide. People stood shoulder to shoulder with fishing lines. Herring fed salmon, seabirds, seals and people. Their eggs covered eelgrass and other shoreline vegetation, feeding nearly everything that could reach them.
Older photographs show the crowds. Families remember the fish. Local residents remember water alive with movement.
Then the silver faded.
The decline of the Gorge herring is not a simple story about overfishing, pollution, one damaged rock or one careless government. It is the history of an entire estuary being altered piece by piece: first through settlement and hunting, then sewage and industry, then blasting, shoreline construction, docks, polluted runoff and the slow disappearance of eelgrass.
It is also a story of recovery. Community work helped bring life back to the Gorge during the 1990s and early 2000s.
But the recovery did not hold.
The fish returned before the governments responsible for the waterway had repaired the conditions needed for the herring to reproduce and survive.
That distinction lies at the heart of this story.
Before the bridge, there was Camossung
Long before the waterway was divided by municipal boundaries, property lines and government departments, the Gorge and Portage Inlet were part of the homeland of the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples.
At the Narrows stood the rocks associated with Camossung.
In the lək̓ʷəŋən account, the Transformer brought Camossung and her grandfather the foods of the area and transformed them into stone at the reversing falls. The rocks were not simply obstacles in a channel. They were living parts of a sacred landscape, connected to the creation and protection of the foods of the Gorge: herring, salmon, oysters, ducks and the other life supported by the water.
The rushing water at the Narrows carried spiritual power. Young people are said to have tested their strength and courage in the current.
This was an understanding of the waterway as a complete system. The rock, the current, the plants, the fish, the birds and the people were connected.
Modern governments would later break that system into pieces:
navigation;
sewage;
stormwater;
fisheries;
docks;
Crown foreshore;
municipal zoning;
contaminated sites;
bird habitat;
recreation.
Camossung did not divide the waterway into departments.
The old story understood something that later management repeatedly ignored: change the physical heart of the waterway and consequences will travel through the entire system.
The Narrows controlled Portage Inlet
Portage Inlet is a shallow upper basin receiving freshwater from the Colquitz, Craigflower and smaller tributaries. Its only marine connection runs through the long Gorge Waterway and the confined passage at Tillicum Narrows.
Before 1960, the reversing-falls rock formed a stronger hydraulic control at that passage.
The rock did not completely block the tide. It restricted it. At different tide stages, water backed up on one side and rushed through the narrow opening. The restriction slowed the discharge from Portage Inlet and helped prevent the upper basin from emptying as completely as it does today.
Local family history describes an upper inlet that was wetter, fresher and more marsh-like.
A family that lived and farmed near the head of Portage Inlet remembered racing small sailboats there during summer. The boats reportedly carried keels about three feet deep. That memory describes a different low-water condition than the broad exposed flats visible across much of Portage Inlet today.
The upper reaches also contained more bulrushes and freshwater-influenced marsh vegetation. Those wetlands sheltered waterfowl, fish and invertebrates while slowing and filtering water entering the inlet.
This was not a freshwater lake. Salt water still moved in and out. But the natural restriction at the Narrows helped create a longer and more gradual transition from freshwater creek mouths to brackish marsh, eelgrass and the more marine lower Gorge.
That transition was habitat.
A private blast changed the waterway
In June 1960, part of the reversing-falls rock was blasted to make boat passage easier.
It was not a carefully planned public restoration project. It was undertaken for navigation and access associated with the Gorge Boathouse.
There were two attempts.
During the first attempt, the tidal current reportedly overturned or threw the men, drilling equipment and working platform into the water. Local oral history identifies a man with the surname Gillespie as being involved and says he nearly lost his life. The exact name, role and date still require confirmation, but the dangerous first attempt is consistent with contemporary reporting.
The second attempt succeeded.
Published descriptions sometimes make the removed section sound like a minor projection. Local field knowledge describes something more substantial: the upper pinnacle was approximately three feet high and about five feet across its base.
Most importantly, the blast did not reduce the rock to gravel.
The pinnacle tipped over largely intact.
That detail matters. It means the event was less like slowly widening a channel and more like knocking over part of a natural gate.
The rock’s importance cannot be judged only from its height. The Narrows is neither very deep nor very wide. A three-foot obstruction positioned in the throat of such a passage could significantly reduce the area available for water to escape.
Before it was tipped over, the pinnacle slowed the discharge from Portage Inlet.
Afterward, more water could pass through the opening at low tide. Portage Inlet began draining more completely—a change that can still be observed.
The rest of the Narrows continued to restrict the tide, but the hydraulic control was weakened.
The blasting should not be blamed for every later ecological problem. Portage Inlet was already suffering from sewage, shoreline alteration and urban development. But it is equally unreasonable to pretend that knocking over part of a natural sill had no consequence.
The event altered the physical stage on which every later ecological change occurred.
Salt, marsh and mud
Changing the opening at the Narrows could change more than the visible water level.
A stronger discharge can affect:
the duration of low water in Portage Inlet;
the amount of bottom exposed;
tidal currents;
sediment movement;
the residence time of freshwater;
the movement of salt water into the upper inlet;
the boundary between marsh vegetation and marine vegetation.
The old upper inlet appears to have retained more freshwater influence for longer periods. With increased drainage and tidal exchange, the system became more distinctly marine and more extensively exposed during low tides.
Bulrush marsh did not necessarily disappear overnight. Ecological changes of this kind usually creep forward.
One patch becomes too salty.
Another dries for too long.
The edge erodes.
A shoreline is filled.
A creek is channelled.
A road and storm drain replace wet ground.
A dock shades another section.
Over years, a broad freshwater-to-brackish margin can shrink into disconnected remnants.
By the time people notice, the old landscape survives mainly in photographs and memory.
The waterfowl slaughter
The abundance of birds in the old marshes also made Portage Inlet a target.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, waterfowl hunting was not always one person quietly taking a bird for food. Organized and commercial hunting removed enormous numbers of ducks, geese and other birds.
Local accounts describe parties of sport hunters coming to Victoria specifically to shoot geese in the bulrushes and marshes of Portage Inlet. Hunters used rafts and boats to reach the flocks.
The exact scale of those expeditions still belongs to the oral and archival record, but the larger history is clear: waterfowl were being killed heavily enough that declining bird populations became a serious concern.
The Victoria Harbour Migratory Bird Sanctuary was established in 1923. It included Victoria Harbour, the Gorge and Portage Inlet.
The sanctuary is sometimes treated today as a pleasant civic feature—an early conservation success beside a growing city.
Its origins were less comfortable.
Protection became necessary because abundance had been mistaken for an unlimited supply.
The same mistake would be repeated with herring.
The first herring decline
Herring once spawned in Portage Inlet and moved through the Gorge in substantial numbers. Federal records confirm documented spawning events in the mid-twentieth century, and generations of residents remember fishing from the bridges and shoreline.
But by the 1960s, scientists were already describing a biological system in serious decline.
Portage Inlet and the Gorge had become receiving waters for the wastes of urban development:
untreated or poorly treated sewage;
industrial discharges;
oil and fuel;
garbage;
nutrient pollution;
stormwater;
fine sediment;
road runoff;
chemicals washed from developed land.
Portage Inlet was especially vulnerable because it was shallow and restricted.
Material entering the system did not simply disappear with the next tide. Fine organic matter settled into the bottom. Nutrients remained available for algal growth. Decomposition consumed oxygen. Turbid water reduced the sunlight reaching submerged plants.
Scientists including Alan Austin, Yasuko Iwao, Michael Waldichuk and others studied the Gorge, Portage Inlet and connected watershed over a period of years.
Their work documented seasonal freshwater and saltwater conditions, pollution gradients, biological communities and declining fisheries resources.
They were not studying a pristine inlet.
They were studying a system already changed by urban development and, importantly, already changed by the 1960 blasting at the Narrows.
The surviving scientific and newspaper record from that period describes herring, oysters, coho and cutthroat as having suffered drastic declines.
The warning was plain more than half a century ago.
The upper Gorge was losing the conditions that once produced its fish.
Eelgrass: the quiet foundation
A herring run is not created merely by adult fish swimming into an inlet.
Herring must reproduce.
Their eggs are sticky. Females deposit them in shallow water on eelgrass, algae and other submerged surfaces. The eggs remain fixed in place while embryos develop.
That makes eelgrass one of the foundations of herring recovery.
Eelgrass also shelters juvenile salmon and other fish. It slows water near the bottom, traps some suspended material, provides surfaces for small organisms and creates hiding places for young animals.
Yet eelgrass rarely receives the attention given to larger fish.
It has no voice, no dramatic leap and no annual ceremony.
Its decline is quiet.
A meadow can be lost a few square metres at a time without producing a headline.
Death by a thousand shadows
Docks became one of the clearest examples of cumulative habitat loss in the Gorge.
A single dock can appear harmless. It is narrow. It may cover only a small patch. Its owner may insist that fish still swim underneath it.
But eelgrass requires light.
A float that remains in place year after year casts a permanent shadow. A ramp can scrape or shade the intertidal margin. Pilings alter currents and collect debris. Boats and propellers disturb the bottom. Anchors tear vegetation. Fuel, oils, treated wood, antifouling coatings and sewage can add more stress.
Then there is another dock.
And another.
Each application is presented as one small private request. Rarely is it assessed as another subtraction from the same finite habitat.
By 2000, Fisheries and Oceans Canada was warning about the accumulated effects of docks along the Esquimalt shoreline of the Gorge. Federal correspondence identified two dozen existing private docks, while only a small number had identified foreshore leases.
DFO warned that dock shading could eliminate eelgrass beneath structures. It also identified propeller damage, seabed disturbance, shoreline alteration, treated wood, antifouling paint, fuel, bilge water and sewage as concerns.
The warning was not complicated:
One dock may cause limited damage.
Many docks can change a shoreline.
More structures were nevertheless built, expanded or later accepted as existing uses.
This is how governments often permit habitat decline without ever formally deciding to destroy habitat.
No council motion says, “Let us slowly remove the herring spawning grounds.”
Instead, dozens of smaller decisions produce the same result.
The shoreline was being domesticated
The natural edge of Portage Inlet and the Gorge was gradually converted into private waterfront.
Marsh was filled or cut back.
Riparian vegetation was removed to create views.
Rock walls and retaining structures replaced soft shorelines.
Lawns reached closer to the water.
Floating docks extended over shallow habitat.
Boats occupied areas once used by vegetation and fish.
Natural wood, branches and organic material were treated as mess rather than habitat.
A tidy shoreline may please a property owner while providing less food, shade and shelter for fish.
This is one of the great contradictions of urban waterfront management: the shoreline is often made visually attractive to people by removing the very complexity that makes it biologically productive.
The Gorge became cleaner-looking in some places while becoming more engineered.
A polished waterfront is not necessarily a healthy estuary.
The community came back
By the early 1990s, many people regarded the Gorge as damaged, dirty and beyond recovery.
Veins of Life Watershed Society began with direct work.
JR and his son Wesley started removing garbage from the waterway. Other people joined. The work expanded into larger cleanup events, shoreline projects, storm-drain marking, outfall monitoring, dye testing, creek assessment, public education and pressure on governments to repair pollution sources.
The work was physical and immediate.
People entered the creeks.
They followed pipes.
They documented contamination.
They pulled debris from the shoreline.
They talked to residents and businesses.
They involved schools and volunteers.
They made the condition of the waterway difficult to ignore.
The work did not solve every problem. It did something equally important: it proved that improvement was possible.
Water quality improved in visible ways. Garbage was removed. Some sewage and cross-connection problems were identified. People returned to the shoreline. Swimming increased in parts of the Gorge.
And the herring returned in noticeable numbers.
The 1990s photographs of anglers crowded onto Craigflower Bridge are part of that success.
The community saw fish where many had expected none.
For a while, it appeared that the Gorge was coming back.
The success hid a weakness
The return of adult herring created hope, but it may also have hidden the weakness of the recovery.
Adult fish entering the Gorge are evidence of presence.
They are not proof of successful spawning.
A healthy local population requires more than a visible school. The fish must find suitable vegetation. Their eggs must survive changes in salinity, temperature, oxygen and sediment. They must avoid toxic exposure from runoff and contaminated bottom material. The larvae must hatch, feed and survive long enough to return in later years.
By the time crowds were again fishing from Craigflower Bridge, significant local spawning may already have been weak or absent.
That means the apparent recovery could have depended on:
a small remnant group;
fish arriving from outside the Gorge;
adults returning without producing enough surviving young;
occasional strong years masking poor long-term recruitment.
The Gorge looked alive.
But the biological chain between adult fish, eggs, larvae and future adults may already have been broken.
The slow second decline
Around 2005, the returns began weakening again.
There was no single day when the herring were officially declared gone.
The schools became less dependable.
The bridge crowds thinned.
A run might appear in one year and fail in another.
People waited longer and caught fewer fish.
Local recollection from people who had watched the water for years became an important record because no government maintained a complete annual account of the Gorge herring population.
By the middle of the next decade, residents were speaking of years without a meaningful run.
Community groups began placing artificial spawning curtains and later hemlock boughs in the water, hoping to provide herring with surfaces on which to deposit eggs.
Those efforts carried cultural and educational value. They kept the herring story alive.
But the absence of eggs on artificial material also told its own story.
Providing a place for eggs cannot help if too few adult herring arrive.
And a curtain cannot replace an eelgrass meadow.
Stormwater never stopped
While the visible garbage was removed and parts of the Gorge looked better, contaminated runoff continued entering the waterway.
Every rainfall washed material from streets, parking lots, roofs, construction sites and industrial properties into drains leading toward creeks, the Gorge and Portage Inlet.
That runoff carried mixtures that could include:
oil and fuel residues;
PAHs;
copper and zinc;
tire and brake-wear particles;
pesticides;
nutrients;
bacteria;
detergents;
plastic debris;
endocrine-disrupting substances;
contaminants attached to fine sediment.
Herring embryos cannot swim away from a polluted plume.
Once deposited on eelgrass or another surface, the eggs remain exposed to whatever the water brings.
A waterway can therefore appear clean to a person standing on a bridge while remaining chemically hostile to developing fish.
The herring do not experience pollution as separate municipal programs. They experience the combined mixture.
The sediment remembered
Portage Inlet and the Gorge also retained the history of earlier pollution in their bottom sediments.
Decades of sewage, industrial activity, hydrocarbons, metals and other contaminants settled into sheltered areas. Some material was buried. Some was moved by currents, propellers, construction and storms.
The water above may improve while polluted sediment remains.
That is one reason restoration can appear successful before the ecosystem is actually secure.
Herring eggs, eelgrass, bottom-dwelling organisms and juvenile fish live at the boundary between water and sediment. Repeated disturbance can bring old contamination back into circulation.
The system did not begin each year with a clean slate.
The bottom carried the past forward.
A recovery that governments mistook for completion
The return of fish and swimmers gave municipalities and regional agencies a success story.
The Gorge Waterway Initiative created a forum for cooperation. Public education expanded. Community events celebrated the waterway.
Those developments had value.
But the institutional response remained fragmented.
One authority dealt with docks.
Another dealt with foreshore tenure.
Another dealt with fish habitat.
Municipalities dealt with storm drains and shoreline zoning.
The regional district provided monitoring and coordination.
Provincial and federal agencies held other pieces.
Every agency could describe its own role while the herring continued declining.
The central ecological question was lost between jurisdictions:
Was the Gorge again producing a self-sustaining herring population?
The evidence suggests it was not.
Success and failure can be true at the same time
The Gorge restoration was a success.
Garbage was removed. Pollution sources were exposed. Public attention returned. People learned that damaged urban water could recover. Herring returned visibly for a period.
The restoration also failed to secure the herring.
Both statements are true.
The community work succeeded in improving conditions.
The larger governing system failed to hold those gains against continued shoreline development, dock expansion, eelgrass loss, stormwater contamination and legacy pollution.
That is not a criticism of the volunteers who did the work.
It is a measure of how much was placed on their shoulders.
Volunteers can pick up garbage.
They cannot, by themselves, regulate every dock, rebuild marshes, enforce pollution laws, inspect every drainage system or prevent contaminated runoff from an entire urban watershed.
The herring returned because conditions improved.
They declined again because improvement was mistaken for completion.
The loss happened slowly enough to be tolerated
The history of the Gorge is full of dramatic events: mass hunting, sewage pollution, the blasting of the Narrows, packed fishing bridges and major cleanup campaigns.
But the modern herring decline was mostly undramatic.
A patch of eelgrass shaded.
A shoreline hardened.
A dock enlarged.
A storm drain left uncorrected.
A contaminated site allowed to keep draining.
A monitoring program shortened.
A responsibility passed to another department.
A year without spawning.
Then another.
This is how ecological loss becomes normal.
Each individual decision appears too small to explain the disappearance.
Together, they explain it.
The meaning of Camossung
The Camossung story belongs at the beginning and the end of the Gorge herring history because it carries the central lesson.
The rock at the Narrows was associated with the creation and protection of the foods of the waterway.
It was later treated as an obstruction to boats.
Part of it was blasted.
The hydraulic behaviour of Portage Inlet changed.
The surrounding habitat changed.
Pollution accumulated.
Marsh and eelgrass declined.
The herring weakened.
It would be too simple to say that one blast caused everything that followed. It would also be dishonest to dismiss the connection between physically altering the Narrows and the later condition of the inlet.
The old story did not say that the rock was valuable because engineers had measured its dimensions.
It said the rock protected the food.
More than six decades after part of it was knocked over, that statement deserves to be taken seriously.
When the silver faded
The decline of the Gorge herring was not inevitable.
It followed choices.
The inlet was used as a receiving basin for sewage and runoff. A sacred hydraulic feature was altered for navigation. Marshes and natural shorelines were reduced. Docks spread across shallow habitat. Eelgrass disappeared gradually beneath shadows, sediment and propeller scars.
Then the community pushed back.
People cleaned the Gorge, traced pollution and brought the fish back into public memory. Adult herring returned strongly enough to fill the bridges with anglers.
That success was real.
So was the later failure.
The fish came back to a waterway that looked healthier but still carried damaged spawning habitat, polluted runoff, contaminated sediment and divided authority.
By about 2005, the silver began fading again.
The herring did not fail the Gorge.
The Gorge failed to hold the conditions the herring needed.
And long before scientific reports, committees and restoration plans, the story of Camossung had already warned what happens when the structure protecting the food is broken.
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