The Secret Life of Channel Markers
By John Morris
How many channel markers are there at your harbour? How many are there in Canada?! Do we take them for granted even though we count on them every day? Yes, we do! The fog surrounding channel markers must be lifted and this column is unafraid to navigate the facts.
To get a comprehensive understanding of channel markers, CTL sat down with Clive Fairway, Canada’s Chief Channel Marker Officer at his Channel Keep Cottage near Rice Lake.
Some background
CF: The whole concept originated in Venice where the gondola drivers anchored salamis to guide their craft through the canals. This concept came to Canadian waters and was effective until the well documented famine of 1849 when the desperate boaters ate whatever they could find.
In Quebec, the colonial authorities initially designated the St Lawrence shipping channels with baguettes, but these were stolen by marsh birds and lockmasters.
The obvious solution was logs from the Gaspé forests. Unfortunately, the lumberjacks’ log rolling competitions in the channel resulting in some nasty collisions and ripped plaid shirts.
To identify the logs used as markers, the couriers de bois chain-sawed half of the markers into pointed ‘nuns’ and the other half into flat topped ‘bishops’. Unfortunately, in prudish Victorian English Canada the proximity and pairing of nuns and bishops was viewed as prurient and the name was changed to ‘cans’, which is still used today.
How about today?
CTL: Is being responsible for a channel mark burdensome?
CF: You know it. It’s a giant pain in the ‘can’, to use a technical term. I do it out of concern for the boaters, who largely don’t appreciate us. In terms of thanks, we get ‘nun’. Fun fact: In Canada, deuteranomaly, a type of red-green color vision deficiency, affects approximately 8% of men and 0.5% of women.
CTL: Have you taken steps to remedy this?
CF: I wrote a piece for National Navigation News called Channel Your Frustration but they declined to run it citing so-called trypos. And perhaps you missed our Change the Channel Day protest when we narrowed all the channels to one metre and affixed notes to all the green markers sneering, “Red Right Return this, pal”.
CTL: A lot of lighthouse keepers have been eliminated and the lights are automated.
CF: Ha! Those lighthouse keepers wrote their own demise. You saw the Peggy’s Cove keeper on the cover of People. The Point Atkinson hotshots were peacocking around on national television. Because they were at the end of rocky promontories, no-one knew about all their wild parties. Isolated heroes? Where do you think the term ‘get lit’ comes from?
CF: Like many modern marketers, keepers have undertaken a public relations campaign to increase awareness of our work and its challenges. We have designated a national holiday to celebrate our marks and their nomenclature with an upbeat festival called “Your Days are Numbered” where boaters are invited to play their special bingo cards by successfully collecting the numbers on the marks without putting their bow onto the nearby rocks. It will be a lot of fun.
Working with artisan fragrentoligists, we have distributed samples of our boaters’ perfume Channel No. 5 incorporating seaweed, grey water and Dr Pepper essential oils. And our Mark My Words initiative in primary schools will teach junior boaters to emulate their parents’ vernacular when they run out of fuel in a busy channel. Start them early, we say.
