Nature Vancouver members and guests are invited to join maritime historian Vickie Jensen for an illustrated introduction to the underwater world, and the B.C. risk-takers who have produced both vehicles and inventions to enable work and discoveries in the subsea world.

Vickie has built her writing career around the importance of documenting and celebrating maritime work. As editor of Westcoast Mariner magazine, every month she went out on coastal workboats—tugs, dredges, charter yachts, ferries and water taxis, interviewing their crews and writing about those vessels and jobs. So, she was taken aback when a reader commented, “You write about everything happening on the water. What about what’s happening underwater?”

That challenge introduced her to the world of submersibles and unmanned, robotic craft as well as submarines, deep-diving atmospheric diving suits and cutting-edge sonar. Four years of interviews with B.C.’s subsea pioneers resulted in her current book Deep, Dark and Dangerous: The Story of British Columbia’s World-Class Undersea Tech Industry. Published by Harbour, it’s a riveting read and a vital chapter of largely unrecognized Canadian achievements and underwater work. It’s definitely not your ordinary desk job. And definitely a different view of nature–underwater!

Vickie Jensen is the author of Saltwater Women at Work and Working These Waters.  She has co-authored Ships of Steel: A B.C. Shipbuilder’s Story, Build Your Own Underwater Robot and the textbook Underwater Robotics: Science, Design & Fabrication. In addition to her maritime writing, Vickie and her anthropologist husband Jay Powell have worked for five decades with First Nations elders to produce curricula and schoolbooks in the variety of complex Native languages spoken on the Northwest Coast. She lives in Vancouver, B.C.

This presentation will be aired via Zoom Video Conferencing. On the Monday preceding the event, Nature Vancouver members will receive the Zoom link in the weekly e-News. To join the talk on Thursday, click on that link after 7:15 pm. The talk will begin at 7:30 pm.  Non-members are welcome and should Email denis@NatureVancouver.ca well in advance to register for the link.