July 2026

Saturna Island is a bit hard to visit.  Ignoring that there isn't a lot of ferries (really, only four a day), once you get on the island you can do most of what you want in a single day.  In July 2025 (last year) we did a trip to Saturna and saw what I think of as big attractions - Winter Point, East Point, The Saturday Market and the Vineyard.  Why got back just a year later?

East Point is an amazing park - it is the east most point in the Gulf Islands with a view into the US in almost all of the directions.  It is a natural meadow with a nice ramp down to the beach.

It was low tide so we went down to the beach to see if we could find anything interesting.  Because this is the mouth of a straight, the current flows fast here (there are warnings for Kayakers because the currents go way faster than you can kayak) which generally leads to rich inter tidal sea life.  It's nice to see solid aggregations of sea stars.

Just off the coast are a number of small islands covered in kelp.  There was a rotating cast of birds that landed on the island and then went into the water looking for a meal.

The old fog horn building is a staffed museum.  They have quite a few posters for local events including the Canada Day Lamb Roast which has been running for 50+ years.

The actual Lamb roast meal starts at around 2pm so we drove back and got our tickets.  The ideal startegy would have been to get our tickets before we went to East Point because we got tickets in the nine hundreds and had an hour to wait before our turn.  We had a lot of time to take in the live bands, the local market and the other food stations.

The Lamb was apparently quite good - you can pick what part of the animal you want (want more organ meat?  Done!)  The meal comes with a rice dish, a salad, a locally baked bun (they make more than a thousand) and a cookie and coffee when you are done.  The tickets are $35 a person.  In Vancouver you can no longer buy gulf Island Lamb - even getting Fraser Valley Lamb is hard (and expensive) and most stores have Lamb from New Zealand or Australia.  Getting a truely local meat product is a rare luxury.

As the tides were low, we decided to drive out to Botanical Beach for a day.  I've been to Botanical Beach lots of times, but a trip in April to 2022 had a new twist - Helen found a Thick-horned Nudibranch in a small tide pool.  Basically this taught us that we weren't trying hard enough to find novel wildlife in the tide pools. I figured this would be a good trip to slow down and spend time.  Unfotunatly, it all went wrong as soon as we went to the bathroom.

There are two trails down from the parking lot - one goes to Botanical Beach and the other goes to Botany Bay.  You can get from Botany Bay to  Botanical Beach by trail, but the trail is muddy.  For reasons I still don't understand, I was told to go even though my dad was still in the bathroom.

The bright colors in the pool attract your eye.  The Sea Lemons are easy to see between the purple mussels. 

We have a favorite parking spot near ArtSpring and we made a bee line for Embe Bakery.  After buying a minimum number of treats for the day, we crossed the road and visited the market.  The Market at Salt Spring features local products (everything has to be grown or made on the island). 

Beddis Beach is at the end of the park so we walked down and had a walk along the beach.  The beach has is mostly sandy and it was busy.  The kids found an swing on the beach.

I have a soft spot for Butterflies - they aren't easy to photograph, they are beautiful and there a lot of diversity on the coast.  There were perhaps half a dozen butterflies flying around from two different species - larger Pale Swallowtails and smaller Painted Ladies.

This is a working farm and they had a wide variety products in process or for sale.  The Lavender Ice Cream was a hit with the kids.