My water story begins 10 years ago when my husband and I moved to Canoe Pass (an arm of the Fraser River) and we bought a float home. We started to discover how life was very different living on the river we began to be more aware of the seasons with the birds coming in the summer in the winter birds coming and we bought a sailboat and we have it beside our house so a big part of our life today is being out on the water. So for example last night I came home from work and we took the sailboat out and went up Canoe Pass and threw down the anchor and had a sunset dinner and so it's all a part of our every day magical life and doing that we've become much more proponents of protecting the river and engaged in preserving the wildlife in our our home area.

I think one of the major challenges in that area is the silt flow so years ago when they changed the Fraser River and they created it to be deeper so boats could go further up, it caused silt to go into the smaller waterways coming out of the Fraser River and it ended up ruining all of the shellfish and so now it's still a huge problem because a lot of the float homes are grounding because they're so much silt being built up so there's a whole dredging issue and for indigenous and non-indigenous there's quite a bit of a change because we have non-indigenous swans on that area and so they're constantly attacking our Mute swans and the indigenous ducks that sort of thing as well so there's a lot of challenges with non-indigenous wildlife in the area and also plant life as well and it's kind like a Galapagos right in that area there's a lot of islands that have been designated for the environment in so you're not allowed to build on them, but evasive species encroaching on all of those islands now.