On September 13th we were happy to receive a visit from Ashley Richter and Lindsey McCrank of CRD. We met at the mouth of the Bee Creek and spent a wonderful hour or so telling our story.
Lindsey is the coordinator of the Harbours and Watershed group which leads the Esquimalt Lagoon Stewardship Initiative. All volunteers of the Bee Creek trout monitoring team are ELSI volunteers.

Ashley is CRD’s media expert and came loaded with cameras, microphones, lights and long list of questions.
The Stewardship Storytelling project led by Lindsey, discovers motivations and experiences of volunteers. Material, videos and images will be added to CRD’s website.

We started with a demonstration of how the trout are recovered, measured and photographed, using two traps that had been set the previous day. We recovered several healthy trout from the sites nearest Pendray house, where photos were taken.
Moving to the lawn overlooking the Esquimalt Lagoon we chatted about our experiences being mindful to remember Beth Mitchell who pioneered work on the creek since 2004. It was Beth who trained our team back in 2017 and the results of efforts remain strong today.
Daryl and I chatted about the challenges and rewards of monitoring the creek, its connection to the lagoon and playing a small part in environmental protection.