We all know Whistler. We all know Banff, and Lake Louise, and that lake so improbably turquoise it looks as though someone has left the Photoshop saturation slider on maximum. We have skied Canada, hiked Canada, cruised Canada and queued at Calgary airport behind other Australians in brand-new puffer jackets. Our love affair with the place shows no sign of cooling, and frankly, why would it? Canada is like us, only politer, colder and slightly better at pastry.
But ask most Australians about the Sunshine Coast and they will assume you mean Noosa. You don’t. You mean a ribbon of forest, fjord and fishing village on the edge of British Columbia, roughly 40 minutes by ferry from Vancouver and a world away from it, and the place where my wife, her 87-year-old mother and I spent three weeks pretending, quite convincingly I thought, to be locals.
Here is the first thing you need to know. The Sunshine Coast is on the Canadian mainland, yet you cannot drive there. It stretches for around 180 kilometres from Howe Sound north-west to the mouth of Desolation Sound, and the mountains and inlets around it are so steep and unruly that nobody has ever managed to put a road through. You arrive by ferry, by private boat, or, if you have any sense of occasion at all, by seaplane.
Take the seaplane. Sunshine Coast Air flies from Vancouver Harbour up the coast, and from the air you finally understand the geography: a crumpled shoreline of inlets and coves, dark green forest running straight down into the water, and so many small islands that it looks as though the land has been dropped from a height and shattered. Sechelt Inlet, Jervis Inlet, Howe Sound. From up there it is one of the great views on Earth. From the ferry it is merely spectacular.
Around 32,000 people live here, spread through Gibsons, Roberts Creek, Sechelt, Halfmoon Bay, Pender Harbour and Egmont. It has long been Vancouver’s escape hatch: the place city people come for the weekend, fall for, and then quietly buy a cabin in, before ringing their boss to discuss “working remotely”.
Now, about that name. You may have heard the theory that it was once the Rainy Coast, until someone in a moment of marketing genius rebranded it. It’s a lovely story. The truth is better.
This is temperate rainforest, and the moss on the trees does not get that thick on sunshine alone. But in 1914, a local named Harry Roberts, who gave his name to Roberts Creek, painted the words “The Sunshine Belt” in huge letters on the side of the freight shed at the Roberts Creek wharf. According to local writer Howard White, Harry had discovered that his patch got a few millimetres less rain a year than nearby Gibsons, and painted the sign mainly to annoy his relatives around the corner. In 1951, Black Ball Ferries started a car ferry service and borrowed the idea to sell the whole region as the Sunshine Coast. It stuck.
So it wasn’t a cynical rebrand. It was a family joke that a ferry company turned into an advertising campaign. To be fair, locals will tell you the coast does get noticeably more sunshine than Vancouver. Over three weeks, I didn’t see enough rain to argue with them.
We came through People Like Us, a house swap, and lived for three weeks in Patsy and Bill’s house in Halfmoon Bay, a scattered, unhurried community of coves and timber homes about 15 minutes north-west of Sechelt. Halfmoon Bay is not a town so much as a state of mind: a few hundred houses tucked into the forest, eagles overhead, a sea that changes colour by the hour, and neighbours who know your name by Tuesday.
The beating heart of the place is the Halfmoon Bay General Store, which has a deck looking straight out over the water, coffee good enough to make a Melbourne barista nod grudgingly, and shelves stocked to cook almost anything you could want at home. We went most mornings. Within a week, the staff knew our orders. Within two, my mother-in-law had been absorbed into the social life of the deck so thoroughly that I began to wonder if she’d come home with us.
We took our time. That was the whole point. No itinerary, no tour bus, no box-ticking. Forest walks in the morning, a drive somewhere new in the afternoon, a long dinner at home with things bought from the general store or local supermarket. It is the great gift of a house swap: you don’t visit a place so much as move into it.
Before our hosts’ friends Colleen and John left us to it, they handed over a can of bear spray. It was old. So old you could barely read the writing on it. But it was also completely full, which I chose to find encouraging, on the basis that it clearly hadn’t needed to be used much.
That optimism lasted until early in the trip, when we looked out of the window and saw bears in the backyard. Actual black bears. Wandering about, as though they owned the place, which, in fairness, they rather did.
Later, on a forest walk with friends Bet and Cam, Bet patiently talked us through what to do if we met a bear on the path. The key, she explained, was to talk to it, firmly and forcefully, so it knew you were a human and not a snack. I nodded seriously. I could not, for the life of me, imagine what I would actually say. “Excuse me”? “Not today, thank you”? “I’m from Queensland, we have crocodiles, you don’t frighten me”? I carried the bear spray on every walk anyway. It remained, I’m delighted to report, completely full.
The Sunshine Coast has quietly become one of British Columbia’s more interesting places to eat, and the food culture is clearly growing. Newer restaurants, cideries, breweries and specialty food shops are opening up and down the highway, and almost everyone is cooking with what’s caught, grown or foraged locally.
The headline newcomer is The Breeze in Sechelt, which opened in June at the TELUS Marina on Sechelt Inlet. It’s a big, airy, two-storey waterfront building with a rooftop terrace, and the chef, Jack Chen, has worked at some of Vancouver’s most respected kitchens, including L’Abattoir and Farmer’s Apprentice. The menu is heavy on local seafood and seasonal produce, and the weekend brunch is worth planning around.
Vin et Mer brings a little French polish to the Sechelt waterfront, and is the place to book for a long, wine-friendly lunch. The duck three-ways is a real treat.
Gourmet Girl became our favourite. It sits on the shore at Davis Bay with a heated patio and big windows facing the water, and serves the sort of generous, homemade cafe food that turns a quick coffee into a two-hour lunch. Order something sweet and take it across the road to eat on a bench by the water. You may well see seals.
For pubs, the coast is spoilt. The Lighthouse Pub in Sechelt began life as a restaurant at Vancouver’s Expo 86 and was floated up the coast afterwards, which tells you everything about how people here approach a problem. It doubles as the seaplane base, so you can watch the floatplanes come and go with a pint in hand. Up at the far end of the coast, near Egmont, the Backeddy Pub is the reward at the end of the drive north, and its burgers have a following all of their own.
And then there’s Molly’s Reach in Gibsons, which began life as a TV set. For nearly two decades it played the cafe in The Beachcombers, the much-loved Canadian series that ran from 1972 to 1990. It’s now a real cafe, and eating there feels a bit like wandering into your grandparents’ favourite show.
If you play, bring your clubs. The Sunshine Coast Golf and Country Club at Roberts Creek winds through tall forest. Blue Ocean Golf Club near Sechelt and Pender Harbour Golf Club further north are smaller, friendlier and blessed with the sort of scenery that makes a triple bogey feel almost reasonable.
By the end of three weeks, we had a regular table, a regular coffee order and a working knowledge of bear etiquette I hope never to need. We had watched eagles fish, eaten more seafood than is strictly decent, and discovered that an 87-year-old woman can make more friends on a general store deck in three weeks than I’ve made in a decade.
Whistler and Banff will always have their crowds. The Sunshine Coast has something rarer: the sense that life here simply moves at the right speed. Go slowly. Stay longer than you think. And whatever Bet tells you, I still have no idea what you’re supposed to say to a bear.
Flights: Air Canada and Qantas fly from Australia to Vancouver. Check current schedules and fares.
By seaplane: Sunshine Coast Air flies from Vancouver Harbour to Sechelt, landing beside the Lighthouse Pub. It’s the quickest and most scenic way to arrive.
By ferry: BC Ferries sails from Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver to Langdale, near Gibsons, in about 40 minutes. A car is essential for exploring the coast once you’re there. Book at bcferries.com.
Staying: House swapping is a great way to experience the coast like a local. Alternatively, accommodation on the coast ranges from waterfront B&Bs to off-grid glamping.
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