Capital Daily for Thursday, June 25

Lime Canada starts building bike-share docking stations around Victoria next week, with as many as 20 of them planned for downtown alone.

Each station takes about a day to install and sits in the same footprint as one vehicle parking spot, so expect to lose some on-street parking while the work happens. Once they're in, you'll be able to rent an e-bike and helmet from any dock through the Lime app and drop it at another.

The fleet launches later this summer, though Lime hasn't named a firm date. City council unanimously approved the program in 2025, and Lime won the request for proposals that followed.

The city is betting the docked model avoids the mess of U-Bicycle, the dockless program that ran from 2017 to 2018 and left pedal bikes blocking sidewalks, stolen, and vandalized. Saanich, Langford and Colwood already run e-bike share through BCAA's Evolve.

She was wrapped in crab lines around her pectoral and dorsal fins, and she'd been dragging them for days before anyone got close enough to help.

The whale, a three-year-old humpback known as Artemis, was first spotted June 11 by Royal Canadian Navy crew aboard the auxiliary vessel Stikine, working at the military's experimental test ranges in the Strait of Georgia. The navy called in DFO's Marine Mammal Rescue Unit, and the two teams tracked her for four days, working from a rigid-hulled inflatable to cut the gear away piece by piece. On June 14, the last rope came off and Artemis swam free.

Entanglements like this are getting more common as humpbacks rebound in the Salish Sea, and the gear isn't always an accident. DFO estimates 600,000 to 800,000 metric tonnes of fishing gear is lost or cut loose worldwide every year.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the CRD issued a blue-green algae warning Wednesday for the main beach at Lower Thetis Lake. The toxins can cause headaches and abdominal pain in people, and fatal liver damage in dogs, so keep pets leashed and out of the water. A similar advisory is still in place at Beaver Lake.