Photo: Sailing up Zeballos Inlet.

From Nuchatlitz the west wind blew us up Esperanza and Zeballos inlets to the former mining town of Zeballos where we tied up next to the Mid-Island Ice Plant and watched the seiner Northern Cloud bring in a load of pilchards. These fish, related to sardines but larger and oilier, were once so abundant on this coast that there were 26 reduction plants to process them. Then they just disappeared in the late 1940s, early 50s. Now they are coming back. I wrote about this fish's strange disappearance in Voyages to Windward.

We had heard that the historic Zeballos Hotel had burned down last winter in a lightening storm and wondered how that would affect the town. But we found a replacement under construction and down the road the Blue Heron Restaurant served us an excellent meal on a deck overlooking the mountains. Now if the town could only figure out how to get a decent grocery store.... As I described in Voyages to Windward, Zeballos was once a mining town, then a lumber and fishing town and now is struggling like so many small towns on the the west coast of Vancouver Island.