By Keith and Heather Nicol
After attending MusicFest my brother and his wife wanted to check out the Royston Wrecks by sea kayak. There is an informal boat launch just to the north of Royston Rd at the Royston Seaside Park. By informal we mean that there is a packed gravel beach that you can use to get your kayak to the water. It helps to use a set of wheels to make the carry from the car to the water abit easier. It is best to do this paddle on a relatively high tide since this will reduce the distance needed to wheel your kayak to the shore. We launched on a 3.7 meter tide on Monday July 15th and as a bonus we had an eagle as a greeting party.
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An eagle greeted us at the launch site
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Paddling past one of the many wrecks in the area
The Royston wrecks are just about 500 meters away and make for a very different paddling experience since you can paddle right up to the remains of several ships that were intentionally sunk as a breakwater in the late 1930’s. At that time logging was important in this area and trees cut here would be towed to saw mills in New Westminster on the other side of Georgia Strait. But in the fall and winter strong south east winds would create problems for establishing log booms in the harbour at Courtenay and a breakwater was needed. Over time 14 “wrecks” were sunk in this area and included old whaling boats, schooners, freighters and tugs. They even included the "Melanope", a 79-metre 3-masted sailing ship built in the mid 1870’s. Not much is left of these “wrecks” now but they are ideally suited to viewing from the seat of a kayak. Another bonus was seeing about 20 blue herons on western part of the breakwater rocks. We are not sure what attracted so many herons but for whatever reason they seem to like this area. See you on the water.
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3 of about 20 blue herons that were at the western end of the breakwater
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Using wheels to get our kayaks to and from the parking area
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