Your boat and your date
Sailings to Sturdies Bay run from Tsawwassen and from Swartz Bay, and some route via the other Southern Gulf Islands, which adds an hour or more. Book the vehicle deck ahead and set the arrival time above to match your actual sailing.
The run
Hour by hour
9:15 am
Roll off at Sturdies Bay
Fill up on coffee in the village before you head north — there is nothing at the far end of the island.
9:25 am
Drive to Galiano Island Sandstone Shore
10 min · 8.1 km on Porlier Pass Road and side roads. Pavement gives way to narrow shoulder — park where signage allows.
9:25 am–10:40 am
Galiano Island Sandstone Shore
Collecting is permitted here within reason. Take less than you find.
11:25 am
Lunch out of the pack
Eat before Pebble Beach so the whole low-tide window goes on the cobble, not on sandwiches.
11:37 am
Drive to Pebble Beach Reserve
12 min · 9.7 km on Porlier Pass Road and side roads. Pavement gives way to narrow shoulder — park where signage allows.
11:37 am–1:52 pm
Pebble Beach Reserve (Qw'xwulwis), Galiano Island
Study it, photograph it, leave it. Removing material is not allowed.
2:13 pm
Back to Sturdies Bay
21 min · 18 km. Be in the lane 30 minutes before your sailing; summer weekends fill up.
Galiano Island Sandstone Shore
Fossil concretions, sandstone — Nanaimo Group Cretaceous sandstones form honeycombed shoreline with occasional fossiliferous concretions
- Region
- Gulf Islands
- Materials
- fossil concretions, sandstone
- On the ground
- 1 h 15 min
- Rule
- Take allowed
- Season
- Spring–fall.
Tracing the nearest pull-out…
Access: BC Ferries to Galiano, then public shoreline access roads.
Hazards — slippery sandstone; tidal cutoff Rules: Loose float from public shoreline is generally fine; avoid private beachfront.
Pebble Beach Reserve (Qw'xwulwis), Galiano Island
A long cobble-and-pebble strand on the northeast shore of Galiano, about two thirds of the way up the island. The beach is a natural sample tray: every clast the Cretaceous rivers dumped into the Nanaimo Basin gets sorted, polished and laid out by the tide. Protected ground — study and photograph, do not collect.
- Region
- Gulf Islands
- Materials
- jasper, chert, quartz, agate, fossils, volcanic
- On the ground
- 2 h 15 min
- Rule
- Look only
- Season
- Year round; best on a big minus tide in winter and early spring when storms turn the berm over
Tracing the nearest pull-out…
Access: Reached on foot from the Galiano Conservancy trails off Porlier Pass / Cook Road, near the north end of the island. Parking is limited roadside; walk in. Foreshore below the natural boundary is Crown land, but the uplands are Conservancy (District Lot 63), Crown reserve (DL 60, Lot 1 of DL 66) and the adjacent Nature Trust Qw'xwulwis - Cable Bay Conservation Area. Ferry to Sturdies Bay, then roughly 45 minutes of island road.
Hazards — Slick weed-covered cobble on a falling tide, log jams that shift with swell, and steep bluff sections that cut off on a rising tide. Paralytic shellfish poisoning advisories apply to this coast.
Section 03
What you are looking at, and what you may do with it
The cobble at Pebble Beach is not local sandstone. Conglomerate beds in the Upper Cretaceous Nanaimo Group carry clasts that were already well travelled when they were buried — quartzite, chert, vein quartz, granitic and volcanic fragments — and the sea rounds them a second time as the conglomerate erodes. In rough order of abundance underfoot: grey and buff quartzite; cream, rust and near-black chert; vein quartz with iron staining; jasper and red chert; speckled granitic and dioritic cobbles; dark fine-grained volcanics. Nearby siltstone produces carbonate concretions, and Nanaimo Group concretions are a known fossil host — so fossil float is plausible, and is exactly the material to leave alone.
Pebble Beach is conservancy freehold plus Crown reserve, next to a Nature Trust conservation area. Nothing leaves: no rock, cobble, shell, driftwood or fossil. A cobble pocket is a finite deposit, not a renewing resource. The Coast Salish name is not decoration either — do not dig, stack or move stones, and leave anything that looks like midden or worked material exactly where it is. If you want a specimen of the same material, the sandstone shore earlier in the day is Crown foreshore where loose float from public beach is generally fine; keep off private beachfront.
Bring a hand lens, a streak plate, a magnet and a mineral guide, and treat the afternoon as a reading exercise: photograph the clast, note where in the beach profile it sat, put it back. If you see orcas — the beach-rubbing story here is unverified local lore, and the documented rubbing beaches are 300 km northwest at Robson Bight — stay on land and keep your distance.