My wife and I have lived on San Juan Island since 2009.  Like many of you we are environmentally oriented, especially since I worked for 40 years in ocean technology.

My major concern is that the current CAO is based on facts that do not apply to the San Juan Islands and is missing facts that do. The centerpiece of the CAO plan – imposing deep setbacks and buffer zones to protect and restore our marine environment – is based on scientific data from the wrong watershed.

I was appalled to find no oceanographic studies describing our local marine waters are cited in San Juan County’s BAS. Instead they are based entirely on studies of the wrong watershed: the Puget Sound. Our islands belong to the Southern Straits of Georgia system, about 10 times larger in water mass and river outflow volume.

In fact, due to seabed and tidal flow features just to the south of us there is little mixing of our island and Puget Sound waters because of our strong tidal cycles.  These tides also create a massive upwelling of clean Pacific waters along our shores, bringing fresh ocean bottom waters to our shorelines.

That means our island’s shorelines have the best flushed marine waters of any coastline in the lower U.S.

We are immersed in a huge B.C. circulation system that mixes massive river outflows from the Fraser River basin with Pacific waters.  Our local marine waters are Canadian, and as such contain the effluent of 80 percent of B.C.’s economic output.

We San Juan Islanders will be better served by focusing on the few local area problems we have caused – and can do something about – rather than be naively pursing broad, restrictive ordinances that will have not make any difference in our marine waters.

It is time for San Juan County to step back and get the Ocean Baseline Science for our islands right before proceeding further with their CAO and SMP initiatives.

David Hyde

San Juan Island