Sea change
Diane Bernard scans the waters off Vancouver Island’s rocky shore with the practised eye of someone who has lived beside the ocean for most of her life. Her eyes are sea green, not quite as intense as the emerald colour of the sea lettuce she’s munching on as she talks.
She’s describing why she left the high-stress world of mediation and arbitration, where her role was to bridge the frequently fractious divide between management and unions, to become “the seaweed lady.”
Turning a corner
“I was turning 50, and I thought I could do more of the same and do it well. But it meant travelling to Vancouver and Toronto and taking me farther away from this,” she says, sweeping a hand over the waves lapping the shore of Whiffen Spit in Sooke, about 40 kilometres west of Victoria. “And I started thinking, Finally my children have grown up, here I have been preaching about staying local and staying in a community, and I was going to run. I didn’t want to be sitting in boardrooms — I wanted to be here.”
So she decided to stay put. Bernard, now 56, runs a growing business based on the ocean garden she knows so well. Her parent company, Outer Coast Seaweeds, supplies edible seaweed to a number of high-end restaurants in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island. Its offshoot is Seaflora, a line of skincare products based on seaweed, ocean mud and sea water.
Using what they had
Swapping business suits for gumboots is a sea change that would be difficult for most people to fathom. But it was a natural for Bernard, a third-generation seaweed aficionado. In her grandparents’ generation, people used seaweed to stuff mattresses and insulate buildings. Before fishing boats had on-board refrigeration, the fishermen on the Gulf of St. Lawrence’s Îles de la Madeleine, where Bernard grew up, used it to keep lobsters cool while they were out at sea. Her uncles chewed dulse, a type of dried seaweed, instead of chewing tobacco. It was the perfect raw material because it was available, plentiful and free. “In those days, it was about survival — you used what you had,” Bernard says.
But even with that family history, seaweed didn’t immediately spring to mind when her husband, George, a water quality researcher with B.C.’s environment ministry, encouraged her to take a year off work at age 49 to decide if she wanted to start her own business. She considered everything from working with wood products to growing edible flowers, but nothing seemed to hold water.
