I'm Harvey Gifford. I met all of you this morning, but I actually didn't realize I was going to meet you again, so it's probably going to be pretty repetitious, as dredging is one of my main points here.
We have 93 vessels in our harbour, and 23 are recreational. We have a decline in the commercial boats basically due to the way the salmon fishery has gone. But we have no problem filling the harbour and are doing the municipality a service, I guess, by creating space for these recreational boats. But I will say that commercial fishing vessels have a priority, because they are what the harbour was built for.
I think our harbour is running very well under the harbour authority, as we've managed to put some money in the bank and vessels are paying their own way. We have a residence in the harbour now, which the municipality helped us get, and it's occupied 24-7 by our wharfinger. Of course, he has joint duties; he looks after the harbour for four hours a day, and then he has jobs he does for the municipality. It's good that we have him there; he keeps an eye on everything, and he's the one who collects the money for us.
We have the storage building. I think there are 16 lockers in there—or 17, as I think Simon said—which are all rented out to commercial fishermen. I don't know if you saw our pump-out station, thanks to the government, which funded it. We have that installed now to help keep the harbour a little cleaner.
I think we have a good relationship with the staff at DFO, but being one of the smaller harbours, we sometimes feel we're being put aside for larger projects and larger harbours, which may or may not be true. We would appreciate some funding for an electrical upgrade; our docks are in need of an electrical upgrade. We're badly in need of some dredging, as we have boats now that sit on the bottom at low tide. Everybody's talked about that.
Access to the harbour is another big problem. We have space at our docks for larger vessels. I think the reason we're not getting the docks filled up is that we don't have proper access to the docks. You can get in on high tide, but you can't run a business when you have to wait for high tide for your vessel to be able to leave the harbour. It's getting to the point now, as you saw, in the harbour today that some of the larger vessels need a six-foot tide to get out into the river—or into the main channel, anyhow.
There was lots of water down there today, but with the freshet running, it brings it up a couple of feet. It was a mid-tide, at 8.9 feet at 9 o'clock this morning when you were out there, so there was lots of water there. But it's too bad you couldn't see it at zero tide, with no freshet. It's getting to be a really serious problem.
I've brought a bunch of photos, with quite a few copies. There's a CD to look at when you have the time. When you're all together, maybe you could look at the CD. It is quite interesting. It's from a helicopter that took aerial photos of what's going on and how bad the situation is. There's also a map in there. It shows the reason we're having the problems we're having now. They redirected the river to keep the main arm open for freighter traffic. The main channel used to come down through Ladner, but then they blocked that off and directed it down what they call the South Arm now, and they put in all of these training walls, so that the whole flow of the river runs down. And we get the slow-moving water in which the silt settles and doesn't get swept out.
I don't know if you'd call it a map or chart, but there's a chart on which I've pencilled in red where all these training walls were put in to get that flow of the water going down the river.
I think I might have mentioned this morning that I'm not really too sure that it's the best thing for salmon fingerlings coming down the river, either, because—I'm not positive about this--with all that force going down the main river, they get pushed out into the salt water sooner than they should. It takes them a little while to adapt from the fresh water to the salt.
For some reason or other, there seems to be less water in the river now than there was years ago. I'm talking about maybe 30 years ago. I see it with pilings, the cut-off pilings that were cut off at low water 30 or 40 years ago. They're still there, but now, in low water, they're sticking three feet out of the water. I don't know that anybody can answer that question, but I definitely feel that there's less water in the river than there used to be. I've been playing down at that river since I was a kid.
I don't want to repeat myself too many times on the dredging. I understand that dredging all comes under what is now known as the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority. We used to have three authorities: the North Fraser, the Fraser, and the Vancouver. Now they're amalgamated. I think their interests are all in shipping and trade.
I went to a presentation they had for harbour users, and nothing was shown about pleasure craft, float homes, or commercial fishing. Nothing. Everything was all about freighter traffic. I understand they're the ones who are responsible for this dredging. Well, every time a freighter comes into a river, they get paid for that. They get so much a gross ton for the freighter coming into the river. They pay their own pilotage fees, so the pilots aren't costing us any money. When they do dredge that river, they're selling the sand.
Now, I don't know how much money they're taking in from all this, but the whole dredging thing shouldn't be a direct cost to the government. They have to have some profits in there somewhere, I would assume. They're helping to pay their way selling the sand. They're talking about coming up with a dredging strategy. Maybe it will happen. I hope it will happen. I would say that we're going to be swept underneath the carpet, because it all fits into trade and freighters and what not.
I don't know if you people can help us on that dredging issue, but I'm sure you can put pressure on the powers that be. On behalf of all river users or water users, I just hope you can do something to help us get these side channels dredged to keep the water running.