After the Fire: Starting Over in Telegraph Cove

Jim Borrowman has been defleshing marine mammal skeletons since 1989, when he helped federal scientists transport a dead killer whale from Namu, B.C., to Telegraph Cove, where it was hauled ashore and necropsied.

Borrowman was allowed to keep the whale’s bones, and they eventually became a showpiece at the Whale Interpretive Centre, a passion project for Borrowman and his wife Mary that, until recently, housed the largest public collection of marine mammal skeletons in the province.

In the early morning of Dec. 31, 2024, fire consumed the Whale Interpretive Centre.

Along with the building, 20 fully articulated and over 40 full or partial skeletons were lost in the flames.

Also lost were dozens of exhibits, irreplaceable artifacts from B.C.’s whaling era, a life-sized fibreglass model of a juvenile killer whale, collections of skulls and baleen, the contents of the gift shop — besides donations and a modest admission fee, the only way the Whale Interpretive Centre generates cash — and many of Jim’s tools, which he was using to construct two new exhibits.

What didn’t go up in smoke was the Borrowmans’ energy and devotion.

“We were devastated, we were defeated” at first, says Mary.

But when they got up on New Year’s Day after that first sleepless night, the northern lights were flickering over Johnstone Strait. It felt like a sign, she says.

“I said to Jim, ‘It’s a new day, and we can make it all come back,’” Mary recounts.

Less than 48 hours after the fire, the non-profit society that runs the centre announced a fundraiser to rebuild. Its goal: $1 million.

As a tourism draw, the Whale Interpretive Centre — located in Telegraph Cove, with its charming boardwalk and historic buildings — is a primary asset in the North Island’s tourism quiver.

The cove is a natural stopping point for people travelling up island, and it’s a hub for sport fishing, kayaking and whale-watching.

Upwards of 12,000 people visit each year, and the outpouring of support when news of the fire broke demonstrated the centre’s reach, from around the world to right around the corner.

Ernest Alfred, a teacher from Alert Bay who oversees the culture and language program for the local school district, has been coming to the centre since he was in elementary school.

“The centre is so incredibly important for teaching people about this place and everything that lives in it,” he says.

As a place that people think of with fondness, it represents the culmination of a journey from a time when some people saw killer whales as vermin or competitors for salmon — a killer whale with bullet wounds wasn’t unheard of even into the 1980s — to recognizing them as being worthy of federal oversight and protection.

In B.C., Telegraph Cove has been where ocean research, education, tourism and conservation came together to make a difference.

And although Jim Borrowman is the first to say he was just along for the ride, for many of those years he has literally been driving the boat.

An eager student

Borrowman first landed in Telegraph Cove in 1975. The apprentice carpenter, already a keen diver and photographer, arrived looking for a job with $18 in his pocket. After helping build a hotel in Port McNeill a little ways north, he moved to the cove to work at the sawmill. He spent as much time as he could in and out of the water, exploring Johnstone Strait first in a little plywood boat and later in a small inflatable.

Eventually, opting to spend more of his working day on the water as well, Borrowman started a partnership with his friend Bill McKay and ran a classic wooden work boat, the Gikumi. They offered dive charters but also hauled freight, towed logs and took on any jobs that would help pay the bills and support their growing families.

Time on the water also brought them close encounters with wildlife, including the killer whales that would start to gather in late summer. When logging in the Tsitika River valley threatened the animals’ habitat south of Telegraph Cove, in Robson Bight — where killer whales rest, socialize and rub against the pebbled sea floor — the pair, along with Vancouver Island residents, scientists and other conservationists, launched into advocacy.

McKay and Borrowman took people out on the water and travelled to give presentations to anyone who was interested. Their vigilance and the work of many protected the bay and some of the upland forest as an ecological reserve in 1982.

Heightened interest in killer whales and the area led to an increase in traffic bumping down the gravel road to Telegraph Cove, and the Gikumi was often enlisted to take researchers, journalists, photographers and filmmakers out onto the water.

Ever affable and curious, Borrowman became an eager student, absorbing whatever information his passengers — including pioneering killer whale researcher Michael Bigg and former head of the B.C. ecological reserves program Bristol Foster — had to share.

“I’m not a biologist,” Borrowman says. “I learned from [Bristol] and people like him back in the day. They changed my whole life.”

The whales changed his life as well. Responding to the public’s interest in the area, in 1980 McKay and Borrowman — along with Donna McKay and Borrowman’s first wife, Anne — started the province’s first whale-watching business, Stubbs Island Whale Watching.

Borrowman estimates that he’s taken over a quarter-million people from around the world out on the water. A visual and tactile learner, he loved the idea of people getting closer to whales by seeing the size of a skull or handling a rib bone.

The origins of the Whale Interpretive Centre

After Borrowman helped move his first whale down from Namu in 1989, word got out that he might be interested in any skull or rotting carcass on the coast.

Soon, he was in possession of skeletons in various states — hanging in nets and barrels off the dock, weighted and sunk on the sea floor, bleaching on the roofs of various buildings in the cove.

One of the most impressive animals came in 1999, not long after Mary and Jim were married — and before they founded the Whale Interpretive Centre.

A fin whale had recently received headlines for all the wrong reasons, arriving in Vancouver dead on the bow of the cruise ship Galaxy.

Jim made a few cursory calls, fishing around to see if he might be able to get the whale, but didn’t pursue it too far.

Over breakfast one morning, Mary asked him what he would do if he got the whale. Jim had no idea. “You’d better hurry and decide,” she said, “because it’s coming around the corner.”

As a wedding gift, Mary had worked with Department of Fisheries and Oceans officials to get the 20-metre-long whale to the cove, and a tug was about to drop it off.

The idea of an interpretive centre had been on the couple’s minds since the Robson Bight days.

One of the recommendations coming out of the committee that led to the creation of the ecological reserve was to develop a land-based interpretive centre in the area as a place to learn about the ecological reserve, killer whales and other marine wildlife.

In the first step toward making that a reality, the Borrowmans and others dedicated to the cause formed the Johnstone Strait Killer Whale Interpretive Centre Society in 1993.

But it wasn’t until 2002 that the society received a small grant to hire its first two summer students. These first two employees worked out of a small part of the freight shed that stretched the length of the dock, provided at no charge by the owners of Telegraph Cove Resort, Marilyn and Gordie Graham.

After tidying up the space and adding a few windows, the students began to share the centre’s nascent collection with the curious public. One of the students, Mike de Roos, asked Jim if he could try to put together the bones of the fin whale that were now fully cleaned — a fateful question.

It took de Roos three summers to get the job done, but articulating skeletons would become his life’s work — he’s now a sought-after master articulator who has worked on dozens of skeleton projects, including the articulation of three blue whales.

To house the 20-metre-long skeleton, nicknamed “Finny,” Gordie Graham rebuilt part of the freight shed, reinforcing the beams so the whale could suspend from the ceiling where it was hung, its massive jaw wide open as if to lunge through a school of prey.

Over the next two decades, the collection grew as people came to know that the centre was a place where a marine mammal’s skeleton could begin a new life in education.

Fishermen, researchers and Jim’s friends in the marine mammal research world and DFO let Borrowman know when animals washed up. Cash and in-kind contributions were also key to growing the collection. When a Cuvier’s beaked whale was found dead on the west coast of Vancouver Island, for instance, West Coast Helicopters flew it to Telegraph Cove at no charge.

Given that cleaning and articulation of a large specimen can cost $40,000 or more, fundraising was ongoing. The Grahams’ contribution has also been invaluable: they rebuilt the freight shed to house the centre’s collection and have never charged rent.

Rebuilding

The autumn before the fire, after the centre was closed for the season, Jim was working inside with the doors open. A young girl, attached to a small theatre group that was heading up island, wandered in. “She looked up at all the whales and just threw her hands in the air,” says Jim. Dressed in a sort of “theatre fairy dress,” she started twirling and jumping and dancing below the bones. Recounting the day, he says, “This is what it’s all about.”

Hoping that a rebuilt Whale Interpretive Centre will engage future youth is what’s guiding the Borrowmans and the board of the Johnstone Strait Killer Whale Interpretive Centre Society.

Offers of all kinds — cash, skeletons, muscle power, morale — have been flooding in from around the world since word of the fire got out. Fundraising through CanadaHelps has raised over $120,000 so far.

Despite the energy and enthusiasm, the task ahead is daunting and uncertain. How do you rebuild a collection that grew organically over years?

The Whale Interpretive Centre first opened with two skeletons. Today, three remain: a dolphin on loan to the Quatse River Hatchery in Port Hardy, and a pygmy sperm whale — the only specimen ever found in B.C. — and a Risso’s dolphin that survived the fire because they were off-site at de Roos’s studio for cleaning.

A formal report on the fire has yet to be released, but foul play is not suspected. Site cleanup began in mid-March, and while some construction has started, building a new home for the interpretive centre will take time. At best, Jim hopes they’ll have a tent or another temporary structure to work out of this coming season, with summer staff and the few skeletons that remain.

One of the things lost in the fire was a detailed family tree of northern resident killer whales, which outlined the relationships between a community of more than 300.

If that family tree depicted the friendships and relationships that built and sustained the Whale Interpretive Centre, it would show a tangle of tentacles stretching out from Telegraph Cove across the coast — and beyond.

For now, the centre is gone, but the impact it’s had on the people it’s touched and inspired remains.