“The restoration is real, but the pressures remain”

Pausing at the dock’s edge, Lorraine Murray adjusts her neoprene head cover before climbing down the ladder and easing into the Gorge. The January water here at the southern end of Canada’s west coast is clear and cold. She swims steady laps close to the platform, while a pied-billed grebe bobs near shore and a bald eagle crosses the inlet. Farther out, a curious seal surfaces.

“Swimming just puts you right,” says Murray, 73, who has been swimming in Victoria’s Gorge Waterway for about three years, including through nearly two winters.

Swimming leaves her feeling refreshed and alive. Surrounded by the Gorge’s wildlife, she sometimes feels she belongs in the scene rather than beside it.

“I feel like I’m sort of one of the ducks,” she says.

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A full-circle history

Victoria’s Gorge Waterway, a narrow tidal inlet connecting Victoria Harbour and Portage Inlet in British Columbia, has again become a place people enter. Cold-water swimmers visit year-round. On warm days, hundreds gather at Banfield Park to swim, sunbathe and linger over coffee wrapped in towels. The presence of these swimmers is a common sight now – but a generation ago, it was hard to imagine.

Photographs of the area from the early 20th century show beaches packed with swimmers, races on the water and a towering diving platform. And long before European settlers arrived and founded the city of Victoria, the waterway and surrounding lands sustained the Lekwungen people, represented today by the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations, through food gathering, travel, culture and ceremony.

Eventually, everything came undone.

By the mid-20th century, industrial pollution, sewage, failing septic systems and urban runoff had made swimming unsafe and damaged habitat. Shopping carts, old boats, tires and debris collected along the shoreline and beneath the surface. Generations learned that the Gorge was somewhere to look at, not enter.

Cleaning up and welcoming wildlife

John Roe arrived in Victoria in 1994. On his doctor’s advice, he began rowing through the harbour and Gorge, sometimes with his nine-year-old son. At low tide, Roe remembers bumping over submerged shopping carts.

His son asked the question that changed the direction of Roe’s life: “Why doesn’t somebody pick this up?”

So, Roe and his son did.

They began near Tillicum Bridge. By May 1995, the refuse was more than Roe could manage alone. Media attention brought local volunteers, businesses, divers and officials. Over roughly three years, crews removed garbage and debris from the shore and deep water, sometimes with barges and cranes. Using a rope tow line, Roe often dived to collect items.

The visible mess was only part of it. Sewage outfalls and fecal contamination from outdated and failing household plumbing had been entering the water. The cleanup soon evolved into a much larger effort to restore the urban watershed.

“When we did our work, it was just like magic,” Roe recalls. “The Gorge came back to life like you would not believe.”

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On his birthday in August 2001, Roe and his family kayaked through eelgrass so thick they struggled to paddle. Yet recovery did not follow a straight line. Water-quality concerns soon resurfaced, challenging any simple before-and-after account of the Gorge’s restoration.

Kyle Armstrong, executive director of Peninsula Streams Society, describes restoration as a spectrum rather than a finished state. “A shoreline can appear healthy without functioning well. What matters is whether species can feed, shelter, spawn and move between the Gorge and its creeks,” says Armstrong.

There are promising signs. Today, eelgrass is providing nursery habitat and a safe sanctuary; salmon move through the system and juvenile herring use the Gorge to feed and grow. Armstrong refers to the eelgrass as an “absolute ecological gem,” describing its return as a kind of ecological memory: traces of what once functioned beginning to appear again.

“We have juvenile herring hanging out. They’re not spawning yet, but they’re still here,” Armstrong says. “We have salmon making their migration and pathways, cutthroat rearing in these areas. This is a live and living place.”

“If they care about it, they’ll protect it”

After the wildlife returned, people soon followed.

When Jeremy Loveday came back to the city in 2009, a small group was already swimming in the Gorge. Growing up nearby, he remembers it as a place he merely sat beside; at that time, swimming was unthinkable. His first swim years later felt “joyful and surreal.”

Jack Meredith knew that same small circle well. By the summer of 2010, he remembers roughly 20 regulars around the Banfield dock, a tight-knit community whose names and backgrounds he knew. Some swam through winter, some took cold plunges and others wore wetsuits. Post-swim, conversation flowed over coffee and soup.

Roe had already paired swimming with stewardship. When the Gorge was declared suitable for swimming in 2000, he organized a celebration and long-distance race. Meredith and others later revived the concept. By 2012, the Gorge Swim Fest Society was bringing people into the water, showing them what had been recovered and giving them a reason to care about what happened next.

Meredith’s philosophy was straightforward: “If they care about it, they’ll protect it.”

For six years, Swim Fest put that idea into practice. It also revealed how quickly people’s return had outgrown the infrastructure. Banfield’s original dock, about 20 by 30 feet, was too small. For one festival, organizers borrowed a temporary dock roughly four times larger and left it in place for the summer.

People kept asking the same question: couldn’t it stay?

Elected to Victoria city council in 2014, Loveday helped carry the swimmers’ grassroots vision into city hall, where advocacy could become policy and infrastructure. By 2017, the city had installed a larger permanent platform. It became so busy that the society no longer needed a festival to encourage people to swim and turned its attention towards improving access elsewhere along the waterway.

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Meredith remembers when he knew 20 swimmers out of 20. Nowadays he might find 200 people at the dock and recognize two.

The demand continued. In 2024, the city tripled the size of the platform and committed $300,000 towards improving access to the Gorge. The expansion marked a much larger shift: people once warned to stay out of the water were now asking for more ways to enter it.

What Meredith sees as a measure of change, Murray experiences as belonging. Her warm-weather swims stretched into winter. The water became a routine part of her life, as did the people around it. “You sort of become close people when you love the same thing,” says Murray.

She has grown fond of the kingfishers diving, herons working the shallows and seals surfacing nearby. Once, a seal followed her toward the dock, slipped beneath her calf and passed between her legs.

“The seal and I, we met each other,” she says. “It was not more or less than that.”

A process that continues

Familiarity can lead to responsibility, though the stewardship that sometimes follows remains imperfect. Meredith estimates that as few as 10 percent of today’s swimmers remember the Gorge of the 1990s or know who hauled out its debris. Loveday argues that the answer is not to keep people away but to pair access with education, advocacy and public responsibility.

Armstrong avoids swimming after heavy rain because stormwater spikes and sewer overflows can carry contaminants into the Gorge. Restoration, he argues, requires “a shift in how we live on the land.”

Roe’s threshold for calling the water safe is more exacting. He remains concerned about historical contamination, warming water, stormwater, shoreline development and growing recreational pressure.

Their caution disrupts any tidy story in which the Gorge was polluted, restored and saved. Roe began restoring the Gorge because people had stopped paying attention. Three decades later, paying attention is still the work.

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For Armstrong, paying attention also means looking beyond recreation.

At Lime Bay, Peninsula Streams Society and its partners have restored shoreline habitat while helping make it possible for Songhees cultural tours to launch canoes there again. He hopes that return will eventually extend beyond access. One measure of recovery, he says, would be seeing local nations safely harvest shellfish from Victoria Harbour again.

That goal complicates what it means to bring people “back” to the water. The relationship did not begin with swimmers, cold plungers or a dock. The Lekwungen people lived with, travelled through, harvested from and cared for these waters long before the city grew around them.

Asked what the Gorge might say if it could speak, Armstrong imagines something less celebratory than a victory speech. He compares restoration to repairing a relationship after harm: a few right steps do not undo what came before. The response would still be, “Keep going.”

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That feels closer to the true nature of the Gorge.

Eelgrass grows. Salmon use connected creeks. River otters and seals appear along the shores. Eagles nest nearby. On winter mornings, Murray slips into the water because it puts her right.

The restoration is real, but the pressures remain. What has changed most may be that people are close enough to notice both. Perhaps rewilding here is less about restoring the Gorge’s past than about rebuilding a relationship that can shape its future.

The water brought people back. In returning, they became participants in the Gorge’s ongoing recovery.

Now comes the work of sustaining that relationship.