Bella Bella visits Steveston

The village of Steveston is on the southwestern tip of Lulu Island, at the very mouth of British Columbia’s humungous Fraser River. Lulu Island is the biggest of 14 islands that make up the city of Richmond.

Steveston is an old fishing town that dates all the way back to the 1880s! It’s still a busy port for fishing boats. Here I am enjoying the view over the docks. The smell of fish & chips from Pajo’s, a restaurant right on the wharf, made my tummy growl!

Back when my grandma was a cub, Steveston was a big centre for salmon-canning. There were dozens of canneries that took salmon off the fishing boats, and processed the fish to pack it into millions and millions of cans. The canned salmon was exported all over the place, a lot of it all the way to Great Britain.

This is the Gulf of Georgia Cannery. It was built in 1894, and was once the second-biggest cannery in B.C. It’s been a museum since 1994. You can see all the machinery they used to process salmon: from cutting off the heads and gutting the fish, to cutting the fish into pieces and fitting them into cans, to sealing, cooking, and packing the cans into cases.

This old fisherman told me I weigh a whole bunch less than a tyee! Say, do you know what a tyee is? That’s what fishers call a chinook salmon that weighs over 13.5 kilograms. It’s an old First Nations word that means “chief.”

Garry Point Park is just near the old cannery. You can have picnics here, fly kites, see all kinds of birds, and even watch salmon jumping in the Fraser River.

The park is a good place to start walking or bicycling along some of Richmond’s many trails. From Garry Point, you can head north along the West Dyke Trail, with a great view of the Strait of Georgia and distant snowy mountains. 

You can also head east along the South Dyke Trail, and see all the boats and traffic on the Fraser River.

Richmond has 49 kilometres of dykes to protect it from flooding. I could tell that Richmond is nice and flat; today I learned that its average elevation is one metre!

Many boats and bigger ships used to be built right in Steveston. The Britannia Heritage Shipyards is a big museum that shows how wooden boats used to be built.

Wow, all this touring sure made me hungry. There are lots of nice restaurants to choose from in Steveston, with lots of different cuisines that capture the village’s multicultural heritage. Here I am having lunch at a Japanese restaurant called Ichiro, with my new friends Hsiu-mei and Dinise! 

Photos and story © S. Clouthier