Winter Harbor/North Harbor
26 June 2017 | West Vancouver Island
Colin
Winter Harbor is a small fish camp/resort community with about 20 full time residents. In summer, a lot of sport fishermen come to town. We were a bit early, so it was still pretty quiet. There is a 3-plank boardwalk that runs the entire shoreline and makes for a nice scenic walk. It turns out the boardwalk is under the jurisdiction of the Provincial Highway Dept. and they maintain it. There is also a general store, fuel dock and burger shack and that’s about it. Still, the people were quite nice and directed us to a local hike through the pristine forest, where we saw a massive old-growth cedar.
There are many eagles here and a huge population of sea otters. I counted several rafts of at least 20 otters each, right next to the boat one morning. A local guy told me they relocated a few dozen from Alaska right after the Exxon-Valdez oil spill to save them and they have repopulated this coastline, with the last census at over 3000 otters. Great for the sea otters, but kinda hard on the crab fishermen…