October 30, 2008 - 1:57am
After four years, a project to help people in wheelchairs fish at Long Lake is complete.
Brad Durvin's four-year dream of building a wheelchair-accessible fishing dock on Long Lake became a reality Thursday.
The Vancouver Island University aquaculture studies student said he was “delighted" to have the approximately $11,000 floating dock, located in Loudon Park, finally open to the public.
"It's been a long time in coming and I certainly didn't think it would take four years to get to this point at the beginning, but I'm happy more people will now have the opportunity to fish in Long Lake," Durvin said.
Durvin was a student at Nanaimo's Wellington Secondary School early in 2005 when he first came up with the idea of a wheelchair-accessible fishing dock on the lake while he and his dad were fishing in a boat.
He said they observed a man in a wheelchair struggling to fish from the shore of Long Lake and thought it was unfair that the man didn't have the same opportunities to fish in the lake.
"That's when I came up for the idea for the dock and I decided to put the $2,500 scholarship I received (from the Telus SuperPages Make it Real program) toward the project and began contacting groups and organizations in Nanaimo to come up with the rest of the funding," Durvin said.
"Thanks to such organizations as the Nanaimo Fish and Game Club, Wheels in Motion and others, I managed to raise $11,000 in just a month and a half."
However, neighbours around Loudon Park began raising concerns about partiers using the dock at night, as well as park accessibility and maintenance standards.
Then the parks, recreation and culture commission stepped in and began developing a park improvement process for Loudon Park in 2006 to help deal with some of the neighbours' concerns.
Spokeswoman Kirsty MacDonald said the city involved the neighbours in a number of public consultation meetings and, based on these discussions, invested about $100,000 to reconfigure the park's parking lot for easier access, pave the park's trails and improve its drainage systems.
She said a decision was also made to have the fishing pier built in the main part of Loudon Park and not along the trail system as originally planned.
"The park is a lot better as a result of these improvements and we really commend Brad Durvin for his efforts," MacDonald said.
The Freshwater Fisheries Society of B.C. also joined Thursday's celebrations with the release of 2,000 rainbow trout into Long Lake for local anglers.
*Originally published in the Nanaimo Daily News
Tags: In the Community
