Island firefighters struck gold at a closed-bid auction last week, officials said, and Salt Spring’s fire district will put its first-ever ladder truck into service this spring.

And in a surprising turn of events, a good deal just got even better. Salt Spring Island Fire Rescue (SSIFR) Chief Jamie Holmes told district trustees Monday night, March 16, that not only had the district’s bid on a used 2009 Spartan-Smeal “Gladiator” ladder fire truck had been accepted — and the aerial apparatus, formerly in service for the Saanich Fire Department, would soon be joining the island’s fleet — but also that the $326,350 cost was now being fully covered by an anonymous donation.

“Today, I received a letter from a private foundation,” said Holmes, “[saying] ‘we are proud to support your valuable fire department and the Salt Spring Island community; we do not require any naming or public recognition.’”

The purchase of an elevating device has been part of the fire district’s strategic plan for a few years, Holmes said, although ladder trucks cost upwards of $2.5 to $3 million new and have multi-year wait times for delivery. The used Saanich “quint” fire truck has been professionally maintained, he said, and even apart from the donation had represented an “excellent value” for the district at a cost of $305,000 — plus tax.

“Actually, a member [of the anonymous foundation] approached one of our members, asking after some news articles about the need for an elevated device, and the pieces just fit together at the right time,” said Holmes. “Now we are in the elevating [apparatus] game at no capital cost to the community; we can protect current structures on Salt Spring, and evaluate if in the future we need something bigger — or even smaller.”

“Quint” apparatus simply means the truck has five major functions, Holmes said. In addition to the 75-foot ladder, the new truck has a pump, hydraulic generator, extrication equipment and ground ladders. The fire district’s board authorized the purchase through reserve funds already allocated for apparatus replacement, and passed a resolution accepting the generous donation offer.

In the meantime, Holmes said, the Saanich Fire Department has agreed to temporarily store the vehicle and coordinate training for Salt Spring firefighters on it at their facility, until the new fire hall on Lower Ganges Road is complete and ready for SSIFR operations to shift there — still expected to take place May 1, with a community celebration now planned for May 24.

The truck will meet firefighters’ needs to respond to emergencies at several multi-storey care facilities on Salt Spring, Holmes added, including the four-storey supportive housing complex built on Drake Road, and will help “future-proof” the department for any future densification planned in Ganges.

“An apparatus like this, with care and maintenance, we can get it to 30 years, and if we find after a number of years it’s not right for us we will get very close to what was paid for it.” he said. “We’ve never had an elevating device as part of our operations before, so we don’t know what we don’t know. We want to make sure we don’t make a $3-million mistake.”

Salt Spring’s Callum and Cianan McGuffin seem eager enough to spend a little time ashore after completing a global circumnavigation Friday, Feb. 20 — in a sailboat older than the two of them combined.

But islanders should not expect the McGuffins to go too long between adventures. The brothers, now 26, learned to sail at the Salt Spring Sailing Club, as junior members racing 420s — they both pointed from the dock and smiled, having tied up Saumure only metres from where they first found a love of sailing. 

They felt the call of adventure early on. Crewing aboard various boats across B.C., they found themselves choosing increasingly daring trips. After completing the storied Race to Alaska in 2019 as the then-youngest sailors in race history — in a “leaky little J/24,” Cianan chuckled, with third brother Finn and compatriot Conner Ekelund  — the pair scarcely seem to have paused, working to set aside funds for a new journey. They started boat shopping — on a budget — landing on a 30-foot Hunter-Vogel built in 1970.

“There wasn’t a huge range of options,” laughed Callum. “But this one is old, with really thick fibreglass, a solid hull and full keel — and heavy. That’s what we were looking for. We bought it for $7,000, so it was well within our price range.”

The interior plywood was rotted, so much of it was replaced along with every single window. Callum was working at Leitch and McBride Sailmakers in Sidney at the time, he said, so he stayed late in the evenings and built Saumure’s sails.

Right from the start they’d been keen on sailing the Northwest Passage, but with pandemic restrictions that was off the table. A co-worker had regaled them with stories of sailing to New Zealand back in the 1990s, so they set off to do that — leaving Salt Spring Island on July 18, 2022.

They characterized the crossing to Hawaii — itself often a sailing “bucket list” trip — as a sort of “test run,” and said there had been some rough weather but all downwind. Coming into New Zealand was tougher, Callum said — 30-foot waves, a big storm with strong winds. At one point the anchor, which had been tied down on the bow, broke free.

“I was up on the bowsprit, holding on with one hand and trying to get the anchor tied off with the other hand, and then this wave came along,” he said. “And you can hear them coming, it’s like a rumble as they come in. It swept me, ripped my hand off the bowsprit and threw me against the mesh. I was tied on, so it wasn’t real danger, but it was a little unnerving.”

“There’s so much water coming over the decks,” agreed Cianan. “It all comes down through the hatches, down through the air vents, basically anywhere it can. And when you’re on deck, you’re just looking up at a wave, way up above you.”

After that harrowing finale to their five-month journey, they figured Saumure could probably get through just about anything. So after a “quick” two-month hike across the length of the South Island Te Araroa and a jaunt over to Australia to drive the Great Central Road, the pair flew back to their little boat to pore over maps and decide what to do next.

“So we’re looking at the charts,” smiled Calllum. “And when you look at it, it sort of looks like you’re halfway around the world.”

Cianan laughed. “It turns out you’re nowhere near halfway.”

Crossing the Indian Ocean, they “accidentally went through a cyclone,” Cianan said. Surprisingly it wasn’t the storm itself but rather the anticipation of it that was most disquieting.

“Seeing the cyclone on the chart coming toward us, and there’s nothing we can do to get out of its way,” he said. “That was unnerving.”

“So we came up with the idea, since cyclones spin clockwise in the southern hemisphere, we could just go down to the south of it and tuck in close,” said Callum. “We’re calling it the ‘cyclone slingshot,’ and it worked pretty well — we took like two weeks off our crossing to South Africa.”

“I don’t know if I’d recommend it,” chuckled Cianan. “But yeah, it worked well.”

After what had become a 34-day crossing to Richards Bay, between bouts with thieving monkeys they were warned about the Agulhas Current, a powerful south-board stream along South Africa’s east coast that moves like a nine-knot river. Picking the right weather was critical, they were told — quite often the wind and current run against one another, making for steep and dangerous waves.

“But along the route, everyone had always been telling us everything was ‘too dangerous,’ and how we shouldn’t be doing stuff, so we didn’t really pay much attention,” said Cianan. “It turned out in this case, they were right.”

They left Richards Bay with 70 knots of wind against them, and the current behind. Callum and Cianan estimated it was five days of 40-foot waves, water coming through hatches, a bilge pump struggling to keep up and practically no sleep — they had to keep extra watch, as they were also right in a shipping channel. 

The reward was Namibia — like nothing they’d ever seen — giant sand dunes coming right down to the ocean. They visited shipwrecks and endless stretches of sand with virtually no humans around. 

Then they had to decide between several options to get back home to Salt Spring. The Panama Canal would be expensive, they realized — and arguably not particularly exciting. Rounding Cape Horn would be practically the definition of excitement, but given the time of year they were going the wrong way and would be sailing upwind the entire time.

That put the Northwest Passage back on the menu. They went on to Saint Helena, a remote island in the middle of the South Atlantic, and began what became their longest and most gentle crossing of the trip — 54 days of good wind and weather, Callum said. Just past Bermuda, they were awakened to the sound of fermenting cans exploding in storage beneath their bunk, leaving them with an unpleasant smell below-deck and little in provisions — two kilograms of oats and “whatever fish we could catch” for the last two weeks into Halifax.

But they’d made it. Leaving Saumure in Nova Scotia, they came home to work again, then flew back to sail up to Greenland’s Disco Bay and meet the first of the trip’s icebergs. At Pond Inlet on Baffin Island, they learned there was ice moving east through Lancaster Sound.

“Coming to the Northwest Passage, we were so far behind schedule,” said Cianan. “And it just meant the weather was getting worse and worse and worse. But we just had to keep going.”

Turning south, they went through Prince Regent Inlet and “five- to seven-tenths ice coverage.”

“It’s like a maze, trying to find leads through the ice,” said Cianan. “It was actually pretty fun, if intimidating at times — sometimes you choose and don’t make it all the way through, and then it starts closing up behind you.”

Prince Regent featured a polar bear that swam after them for longer than they expected it might, followed by a stop at the long-abandoned Hudson’s Bay trading post at Fort Ross. Favourable ice-free conditions at treacherous Bellot Strait gave them access to King William Island and Victory Point, where they saw old sled runners and assorted other debris from when the Franklin Expedition crew came ashore, abandoning their boats in 1848 — and two more polar bears, cutting the McGuffins’ exploration short.

The real ice choke point was expected to come through Amundsen Gulf into Tuktoyaktuk, Callum said — but they stuck close to shore, sailing in relatively clear shallow water. The highly rustic sauna on Herschel Island was too alluring to bypass, and indeed kept them there two days — but from there it was one long journey all the way around the northern half of Alaska. 

This leg was not without misadventure; at Point Barrow the wet exhaust fell off Saumure’s 16-hp engine, soaking the electronics and putting the motor out of commission and forcing several days of tedious upwind sailing. Once they got it running again, the clutches failed, so they carried on under sail power all the way to Nome, Alaska.

Accessing the clutches required lifting the engine, something accomplished by using Saumure’s boom as a makeshift block and tackle.

“We were able to switch our forward and reverse clutches,” chuckled Callum. “So we could go forward!”

After three weeks in Nome, they decided they couldn’t watch the ice thicken any longer — and seized a six-day weather window to make it to the Aleutians just before another storm. The stretch south through those islands was beautiful and easily among their favourites, they said. Near Bella Bella, Saumure broke her prop shaft; after spending almost a month and a half there — mostly waiting for the new shaft — they set off for the last 10 days’ journey to Salt Spring.

What was going through their minds in that last week?

“Honestly we thought a lot about what food we would eat when we got back,” laughed Cianan. “We actually had a notebook with everything we thought of that we wanted to eat. A long list!”

Three years, seven months and two days later, and after charting 37,070 nautical miles (68,654 kilometres), they sailed into Salt Spring, flanked by a welcoming flotilla from the sailing club. Saumure is moored there, at least for now; Callum said even while they were going through the Northwest Passage they were already plotting how they might return — with a more leisurely schedule and stopping more places, maybe even freezing the boat in somewhere and taking two full summers to explore.

Also in their minds for the future is something more “human-powered,” they said, revealing they’re mulling a canoe voyage across Canada.

For now, logging a trip around the world via the Northwest Passage is a rarely completed challenge to savour — the McGuffins believe they are just the 15th Canadian sailboat in history to manage it. Both brothers said their advice to would-be adventurers is to stop focusing on the obstacles and simply get out there.

“I would say just actually do it,” said Callum. “Everything is a lot easier once you start doing it; things are much more achievable than people think they are.” 

Follow McGuffin Brothers Adventures on Facebook or at their criminally undersubscribed YouTube channel: @mcguffinsailing3715.

A population of non-native deer that has been altering the ecosystem on Mayne Island for decades has grown into the thousands, according to experts, now numbering more than five times an estimate from 10 years ago.

Jeanine Dodds has lived on Mayne Island since 1960, currently serving her seventh term as local trustee for the Islands Trust. When she spoke to the Driftwood in 2015, she described the fallow deer population — estimated at about 1,000 then — as a “ticking time bomb.” At a webinar on Wednesday, March 4, she told attendees she agreed with locals who blame provincial regulators far more than anyone who originally brought fallow deer to the Gulf Islands.

“I grew up here as a child on SḴŦAḴ, Mayne Island, Helen Point,” said Dodds, “and I know what that landscape looks like today and it’s heartbreaking.”

The fallow deer landed on Mayne in the 1980s, when a development plan was approved for a game farm located near Horton Bay, on the island’s southeast corner. At the time, game farms were being promoted by the province itself, as a means of diversifying B.C.’s agricultural revenue streams — and through the Game Farm Act, a permit to farm fallow deer was issued in 1990. 

By 1992, according to Dodds, there were already concerns expressed locally about overstocking, and by 1994 visitors were writing letters to the editor about the dwindling vegetation on the island.

“At that time, the housing I was living in overlooked the historic Robson Farm,” she said, in a large valley to the west of the game farm. “I looked out my window and saw the strangest three deer.”

What followed those first “wild” sightings outside the original farm were literal decades of passionate community discussion and earnest meetings with various ministries, staff and elected officials as they struggled to grasp the size of the problem — and how to solve it. 

Fallow deer today share Mayne Island — if unevenly — with a native species of Columbia black-tailed deer; anywhere large predators have been pushed out, the deer population increases. But while black-tailed deer are found throughout the Gulf Islands, the severity of impact caused by fallow deer is consistently higher.

“Fallow deer have a larger gut system that processes a wider variety of forage,” said Mike Janssen, a forest ecosystem restoration specialist for Parks Canada. “So they eat a wider variety of plants and can do more damage than black-tailed deer.”

Fallow deer also tend to travel in larger groups, eating the new leaves off their preferred plants year after year — and as the old leaves fall off, eventually there are none left. Biologist Rob Underhill, who works with the Mayne Island Conservancy, explained that where the deer have been active, the native plants have been replaced — mostly with non-native deer-resistant species.

The impacts go well beyond just the plants the deer are eating; plants are the building blocks of the ecosystem, Underhill said — taking energy from the sun and making it available to organisms down the food chain, as well as offering the “structural habitat” they need to shelter and reproduce.

“Deer overpopulation also reduces food for pollinators,” he said. “Birds that directly forage on flowers or eat the insects that rely on plants are affected. It has a cascading effect.”

Fenced restoration sites tell the story of how well plants can recover, but they require significant investment and management once the deer are kept out. Underhill said some 2.5 kilometres of fence has been installed on Mayne across different restoration projects, and groups have been gathering data on what grows.

“Fencing isn’t an ideal option. It’s expensive to install and requires maintenance when trees fall on them, or materials reach end-of-life,” said Underhill. 

“Studies suggest the populations will have to decrease very significantly, at least below eight deer per square kilometre, if we want to see a return of herbaceous plant communities to these sites.” 

Island farmer Peter Robinson has direct experience with how costly fencing can be. Robinson has run Mayne Island’s 144-acre Hedgerow Farm since 2016. Hedgerow has been operational since the 1870s, he said, and when his family took over, the primary production came from hay fields — alongside fruit from heritage apple and pear trees. 

“In our first year, we were surprised to see [fallow deer] herds in the fields, numbering 50-plus,” said Robinson. “In the orchards, there was browsing on branches up to about nine feet when they stood on their legs.”

Robinson’s fencing mitigation on the orchard alone has cost some $9,000 so far, he said, and with another $5,000 or more expected this year to finish enclosing that area — and he’s already spent more than $27,000 fencing the hay fields, with another $50,000 needed to protect them fully.  

With hay production bringing in less than $12,000 last year, he expects “payback” in restored production will take at least a decade to materialize. Meanwhile, comparing his per-acre hay production today with his first few years at Hedgerow, his yield has dropped — from 65 to 70 bales per acre to about 25 as the deer population has increased.

“We saw about 50 deer per day on the fields, and they can eat about two per cent of their body weight each day,” said Robinson. “Those fallow deer can consume the equivalent of about 900 bales per year.”

In 2018 the Ministry of Wildlife decided to unilaterally change regulations, designating Mayne Island as an open hunting area for fallow deer year round — and with no bag limit.

“This caused huge consternation within the community,” said Dodds. “It’s all very fine that we have that, but we have very few properties that can — or should — be hunted.”

Robinson allows a select group of professional hunters on their property — hunters removed about 100 in the last 14 months, he said — but his observations had been that the deer could reproduce faster than they were being taken.

A Parks Canada fallow deer management program on Sidney Island to the south collaborated with trained First Nation hunters, with a number of animals being harvested there. Tsartlip Elder Carl Olsen was among knowledge keepers who spent time training young hunters for the task, and said while youth were willing to learn — and that he still goes out with some of them on weekends when he can — it takes a long time to teach the safety and cultural aspects of hunting. 

“You also need to teach them how to clean the deer properly, to skin it, how to be safe about collecting meat,” Olsen said, agreeing they “barely made a dent” in the population. 

“I think that was a really good project, but you don’t learn how to hunt in one or two years,” Olsen chuckled. “I still learn new tricks about hunting.”

In early 2025, Mayne Islanders successfully lobbied the Capital Regional District board to urge the B.C. government to provide sustained funding for fallow deer control. Robinson said staff from the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship had told the Mayne Island Deer Management Society they needed to take on the task of counting the deer themselves.

“They told us how to estimate the size of the population, so using their instructions we undertook an island-wide survey,” he said. “We had 102 people take part, all at the same time in the evening last year, walking the same distance and recording all the deer they saw.”

The count came to a total of 723 that day: 68 native black-tailed deer, and 655 fallow, mostly located in the most densely inhabited areas of the island where the latter have become comfortable around people. 

Presenting those numbers to wildlife staff and the ministry, Robinson said they calculated a likely real population of a “staggering” 5,200 fallow deer on the island — and with a biodiversity-ideal target of 200, he said, “now the government knows we have a significant problem.”

“The impacts of the deer are readily obvious,” said Robinson. “If you go from Mayne to Galiano, you will immediately see the difference in the understory.”

But whether it’s reinstating the use of rifles, allowing trapping and baiting, permitting the sale of fallow deer meat — currently required to be destroyed after a hunt — tracking with drones, administering birth control or subduing with tasers, the province reiterated whatever solutions Mayne Island chooses will come without senior government funding, at least for the moment. Robinson said there had been some openness to regulatory changes, if they didn’t cost much to implement. 

That puts the onus, as it has been, on Mayne Islanders. 

Offering advice after eight years managing the Sidney Island forest project for Parks Canada, Janssen said it would be important to recognize what kind of effort managing deer in populated areas really is. While the work on Sidney was indeed an “ecosystem” project, he said, it turned out they hadn’t anticipated how much of a “people project” it needed to be.

“Successful deer management in the Gulf Islands requires identifying the course of action that the most people can agree to,” said Janssen. “The goal isn’t just to find the most effective deer management method; the goal is to determine which methods are likely to be effective, and also have the most support among the people involved.”

That means getting more voices to the table early, he said, long before picking deer management techniques — addressing concerns well before you start, even when there are serious disagreements. If there are shared objectives, the process of hashing out how to get there can be transformative in a positive way for a community, Janssen said, noting he’d seen people surprised by how much respect and camaraderie could result from those conflicts. 

“Not everyone has to agree,” he said. “Even though some people might prefer a different approach, at least they understand the chosen approach — and they can live with it, rather than feel a need to actively oppose it.”

And, Janssen pointed out, even if fallow deer are eventually completely eradicated, there will still be native black-tailed deer.

“Unless there are wolves and cougars on that island, those deer are always going to need to be managed,” he said. “So the question for Mayne Island is, will deer management be a source of conflict, or will it bring people together? I would say that choice belongs to the community.”

For more information on the society’s efforts, visit maynedeer.ca.