It's a long way off - this maze of islands in the Broughton Archipelago off the Pacific-Canadian coast. Alexandra Morton has lived for two years on board her 65-foot wooden boat. She, her husband Robin, and two-year-old son Jarrett, had known no other quarters, even after Robin died in a diving accident in 1987. They got by, selling charter trips for fishermen and tourists, but to Alexandra, the love of her life was to set out in her 13-foot inflatable raft, the "Zodiac", drift towards a green horizon that looked to her like the end of the world with the sky balanced on a roving edge of ocean and studded by little islands that bear little but 60-foot firs and cedars.

In sending me this news, Matt Getty was telling of a most singular woman who had come to Echo Bay to study orca whales and had stayed on, despite all odds, to fight for the bay's threatened ecosystem. It used to be such a familiar outing for her. She would reach over the side of "Zodiac" and drop an underwater microphone overboard. She was listening for the sound ... of silence. She would regularly set put to follow whales, for Alexandra, a biologist, needed to study them, to know them - and Echo Bay was where she had originally thought they did not exist. All she would listen for was the faint rustle of pebbles, licked by the ripples. Then, suddenly, the silence yielded. A slow, rolling moan would rise, stretch, modulate and fall to an eerie silence, and then came the echo from the steep underwater banks ... then a re-echo, and another and another. It was the call of the killer whale.

Echo Bay, with its community of fishermen and loggers, was also home to half-a-dozen killer whales: the perfect spot for Alexandra to conduct her research on whale communication; a slice of ocean with whales all the year round. As she said, "There came that day when' we followed the whales up to Echo Bay, and we've been here ever since."

From 1984 to 1987, Alexandra and her family revelled in the coastal wilderness. With her Bachelor's degree in Biology, Alexandra had studied captive killer whales in Los Angeles, but to actually live among wild whales in Echo Bay offered her new discoveries. She was the first scientist to record year- round whale behaviour; uncovered new complexities in orca communication; helped to identify and track dozens of whale pods and gave to science the difference between fish-eating and mammaleating whales.

As she says, I long for those first days when my husband and I went out every single day, be it raining, sunny, calm, windy or snowing. We had a canopy over the "Zodiac" and our little son was in there with us." At right is a picture of Alexandra and her husband scanning the horizon for whales, while their son Jarrett tries not to be bored.

Her story is one of sheer grit. Echo Bay posed many challenges to a single mother. She had to get along without electricity, keep her little son occupied for hours in a boat, scare away grizzly bears and keep steady in a house that she built, floating on logs - and all for the opportunity of spending each day with the whales. She thought her floating house wonderful. She could simply pole it around in any direction. "When I didn't like the sun blazing into the kitchen, I just swing the house around to let the sun into the living room." In fact, the house dominated the others at Echo Bay, even though she had to get used to the idea of going up and down with the tides and even pushed up on to the rocks of the beach when the tides came in, waiting for the next tide to come- in and push the house back into the water. "The shudder the log supports made seemed like an earthquake!"

Even with the whales to occupy her, Alexandra had also turned her attention to the salmon farms which she hoped would ease pressure on the wild salmon her whales liked to eat. She was not to know that this could be quite a task. As she said, "One day in 1993, 1 had drifted onto to waters of the Broughton archipelago, engines cut, my headphones ready to record whale calls. When I dropped my phones over the side, I nearly blasted my ears. It was as if a buzz saw was tearing into my head." She then discovered that there was a planted "acoustic harassment device" - a tool used by the salmon farmers to drive seals away from their salmon-filled nets. The device set up an underwater roar that was 50 decibels louder than a jet engine. Alexandra was furious. The sound was also certainly driving off her whales. Over time, she realised how drastic the impact was. She would watch whales fight to enter the archipelago, keep leaping out of the water to escape the noise, then disappear. One by one, the whale families came in, left, and never came back,

Then trouble truck the salmon farms. The fish developed furunculosis. Young salmon died, their bodies covered with red-ringed sores. As Alexandra saw it, sick fish were slow fish, making easy food for predators. But in captivity, they swim around in their own waste and, even with medication, they survive long enough to infect other fish. Also, the harmful bacteria was escaping the farm nets and infecting the salmon in the bay.

At first, Alexandra didn't think she should stay on. "All the whales have left Echo Bay," she said. "I really don't know why I am hanging around here. I want to pack up and go to where the whales are." But she did some rethinking. Echo Bay was her home. She had raised her son there. She decided to launch a new project - salmon!

In the next four weeks, she travelled from one commercial fishing boat to the next. She counted 10,826 salmon in their nets, and she also found in the gut bags of the salmon packing plants, that the stomachs of cleaned Atlantic salmon contained sick Pacific salmon. She then began to correspond and collaborate with scientists around the world and formed "Raincoast Research" - a society focusing on the impact of salmon farming. As she explained, "Salmon provide more to the coast than just whale food. They support fishermen and also sustain an entire ecosystem. They are the lifeblood of the coast."

Then came an infestation of sea-lice that coated and sickened young salmon, covering their silver bodies with pink circles. -In some months she netted more than 700 salmon with sea lice. She then began using a 150-foot seining net to catch and count thousands with sea-lice. The picture [left] shows Alexandra using her seine net to catch and inspect juvenile salmon for the deadly sea-lice.

She also sent out pictures of the infestation to several authorities and collaborated with Rick Routledge, a scientist at the Simon Fraser University, and published several studies about the infection and death of wild young salmon. One of her pictures of the diseased salmon carrying the red patches of sea-lice infection is given [left].

In 2003, salmon farmers were moved off the wild salmon migration routes, but this sparked huge opposition, much political interference and, for years, Alexandra felt that she was just crying in the wilderness. But suddenly, she was heard and taken note of and the Canadian government has now admitted that salmon farms were harming the environment and also killing off the wild salmon. She had only one thing to say: "If people stop eating fanned salmon, the problem goes away. After all, no salmon packer is going to label his product as sick, infected or contaminated."

This does raise a question, doesn't it? Our supermarkets are full of tinned salmon. What guarantees do we have that we are also not eating diseased salmon? After all, all salmon is imported. We have no salmon in our waters.

Alexandra has one other hope - that some day, she will watch the whales come back to Echo Bay. As she says, "I'm absolutely certain that if the salmon farms are removed, wild salmon will rebound, and the whales will be back!"