Sidney Island - Victoria's Easy Idyll
A couple of weeks ago, on a beautiful Saturday, we set out for Sidney to catch a ferry, though not the one from Swartz Bay. Instead we were hopping on the foot passenger ferry the Alpine II to travel over to Sidney Island for the day. If you go over and arrive in Sidney by car, you are going to need to find 24 hour parking though it isn’t much. I should say that you can get to Sidney quite easily on the bus and also by taking the Lochside Trail with your bike (that said then you will need to find somewhere safe to lock your bike for the day).
After parking the car, we made sure to stop the Sidney Bakery, it is a great place for classic doughnuts, but actually good for many other baked snacks and treats as well. If you have time before the sailing, be sure to take in some of the great street vibe of Sidney. You can really feel the impact of building a dense residential core in Sidney as the streets bustle like they would in a bigger city. When I think back to my trip last year to Steveston, apart from the tourists that were along the riverfront, it feels like Sidney has significantly more vibrancy across the whole town centre, if that makes any sense. I will definitely make to do a full post on Sidney in the future because it is such a great little place.
Okay back to the ferry, given our continuing pandemic, you need to book ahead for a spot on the boat, I will say that I felt that they could have had maybe 20% less people on there than they did, but there were still less than used to be on the ferry in years past. The crossing to Sidney Island takes about 25 minutes. As the boat gets closer it needs to weave through the boats moored around the island before finally arriving at a large dock that also accommodates private yachts that are visiting the island.
The portion of Sidney Island that you visit is part of the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve. The park land actually only accounts for about 20% of the island, the other 80% is owned by a strata group. They actually seem to be trying to attract some new purchasers, so if you are interested check out their site here.
Even though you only get to see a small part of the island, it is pretty amazing. As you step off the dock, you see beach stretching out both to the north and the south, the northern part is the long spit that sticks out into Miners Channel (I think? Happy to be corrected on this). Despite being only a few kilometres from the Saanich Peninsula, you feel like you are in a completely different world. First there is the quiet that comes from being in a place without cars, but it also just feels like you have landed on a little piece of tropical paradise, but with pine and arbutus.
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If you are coming ashore to camp, once you get your gear to the beach there are quite a few wheelbarrows to transport it the kilometre to the campground. That is the busiest trail, but even on the day we went, it wasn’t too busy along there, and the campground was full. Our plan was to spend about 5 hours on the island, which might seem like a long time yet it really flew by. We did the trail that goes through the forest from the point overlooking the spit down to just east of the campground with some great views out to the San Juan Islands. When you come out of the forest here you are presented with a golden field stretching down to the water with Vancouver Island rising in the distance, it is truly breathtaking. At this spot we turned south and took a trail that we hadn’t been on before that went right down to the fence with the strata owned part of the island. At the fence the trail turns to the right and you follow it right down to the water and you pop out on just a perfectly beautiful stretch of beach. There were again just a few folks walking around as the travel difficulty limits the amount of people on the island and then those few are again dispersed over the whole place.
After hiking back to the campground, we found a spot on the beach near there. The area now used for the campground was the home of the Sidney Island Brick and Tile Factory from 1906 to 1915*. To me this seems like a short duration for the brick company given the amount of bricks that you can still see on the shore near this part of the island and the amount of old bits of the factory that can be found in the surrounding woods. One of the cooler aspects of this industrial debris is that people can often be found building little structures along the shore like they are playing with blocks.
There are quite a few campsites and having camped here a couple of times in the past I can attest to it being a lovely escape from the city yet with the lights of the world twinkling across Sidney Channel it almost feels like you are hiding out from them. One thing you need to keep in mind if you are wanting to camp here is that you really can’t drink any of the water that they have so you need to carry all of the drinking water you will need. There are taps, but they have a high sodium count and are not recommended for drinking.
After lunch, we decided to head to the spit to hang out for the rest of our time until we needed to board the ferry back. Sitting on the beach it is hard imagine that you are still in the Capital Regional District, the sand is so clean and light and the water is clear and full of life. For whatever reason, perhaps it is the knowledge that you can’t just get up and leave when you want, but you feel more relaxed on Sidney Island than you do if you just pop down to Gonzales or Willows, it might also be the smaller amount of people. Whatever it is, there is a tangible feeling to it, at least for me.
For a further historical note, as you come around the point at the south end of the spit you can look up at the bank and see a very significant shell midden, which shows that this island was home to the local indigenous people before colonisation.
At 230pm we boarded the ferry back, our trip was delayed by twenty minutes because we had to go dead slow due to a passing pod of transient orcas. This seemed very worth at the time. I know that as of writing this the ferry only has its schedule up for this weekend so you might not have much chance of a visit unless you have a private boat this year but I would highly recommend you put it on your 2021 list of local places to visit!
* I did find one reference here, that indicates a later and longer duration of 1908 to 1925 but in my short research it was the only place those years were identified.