On Sunday evenings, Clive Webber puts on his rubber boots and heads toward the waters off Dallas Road to help keep swimmers and other seawater users safe.
The population of cold-water swimmers at Greater Victoria beaches has exploded since the pandemic and hasn’t gone down since, Webber said. “Almost every single time I pass by there’s always a couple of people in the water.”
Webber is among the dozen or so people who make up the non-profit Surfrider Foundation Canada’s Blue Water Task Force on South Vancouver Island, providing biweekly water sampling of capital region’s favourite recreational beaches and waterways.
With polar bear swims a popular New Year’s Day event, the group is looking to inform the public about which beaches will be safe for swimming.
While Island Health samples the waters throughout the summer, the health authority stops sampling after Labour Day.
But not the Surfriders.
On water-testing nights, Webber goes out just far enough to catch one of the lapping waves with a Whirl-Pak, a water sampling bag named after the whirling action it takes to seal the sampler shut.
“I try to get down as deep as I can get without getting my pants wet,” he said, adding that he tries to avoid having other things near the water source. “I definitely find that seaweed really gives us erroneous results.”
The whole process takes a little less than a minute, with the 100 ml sample going straight into a cooler to stay fresh until it gets biked to a lab downtown.
Webber, a stay-at-home dad who lives in the Fairfield-Gonzales area, usually takes samples at several popular Dallas Road locations, including Gonzales Bay, Ross Bay and Clover Point.
All the tools one needs for water sampling can be kept inside a lunchbox.
Surfrider Canada’s sparsely furnished downtown office on Courtney Street comes alive on water-testing nights.
Volunteers stream in and out of the building to make use of the lab equipment that has taken over one corner of the office.
Lynn Wharram, co-lead of the Blue Water Task Force, said water sampling isn’t difficult.
Ten millilitres of the sample is diluted with distilled water, and enterolert, a bacterial reagent, is added before it gets transferred into a blister pack. The entire batch of samples, along with a control sample, gets incubated at 41 degrees Celsius for about a day.
When volunteers come back the following night, they turn off the office lights and flick on UV light.
As samples are illuminated in the ultraviolet glow, contaminated bacterial squares light up like Tetris blocks.
A laminated chart helps volunteers determine the level of contamination, by counting the number of lit-up sections.
“It’s super easy,” Wharram said. “We call it community science because anybody can do it.”
Surfriders began testing water nearly a decade ago to help pressure the capital region to build a sewage treatment plant, Wharram said.
Each sample costs about $15 to test, and it’s all funded by donations, she said, adding that old or unused equipment donated by other laboratories around town also helps to keep costs down.
Surfrider Foundation advises people to avoid getting into ocean waters for the first two days after heavy rains due to the effects polluted storm water runoff.
When it rains, the city’s pollution — the animal excrement, the grease and other byproducts of everyday life in the capital region — washes out into the sea, Webber said. “For a good couple of days, we’ll see the results will be fairly high. Definitely high enough that it’s unsafe for swimming.”
Webber said that his organization’s tests can also be helpful in monitoring long-term trends, such as persistent increased bacterial counts at Willows Beach waters this summer.
On Aug. 14, Island Health testing found an elevated enterococci bacteria count of 4,400 per 100 ml — the highest level recorded at Willows Beach since it began testing for it in 2014, breaking the previous record of 180 enterococci detected in a sample in 2016.
“Something happened this summer,” Webber said of the bacterial count. “And it didn’t seem to matter if it was raining or not.”
The Oak Bay engineering department has told Surfriders that they are investigating the problem, Wharram said.
The latest water test from Surfriders from Dec. 17 shows a Willows Beach water sample with an enterococci count of 10 per 100 ml — well under the 70 per 100 ml standard set by the Ministry of Environment.
Just to make sure, the organization planned to run another test at Willows and five other locations on Saturday afternoon before the annual polar bear swim. Results will be published on Dec. 31 by 4 p.m.
To see Surfrider’s latest water testing data in an interactive map, visit bwtf.surfrider.org/explore/41.
