Qualla: Blubber Bay

Blubber Bay: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. The name is not a joke, and it is not a metaphor. Blubber Bay is called Blubber Bay because whales were taken apart here — hauled up at the north end of Texada Island, flensed in long strips, and boiled down in iron try pots until the rendering smell was the only smell the place had. That industry ended generations ago. The name outlasted it, the way names do, and it now attaches to a ferry slip, a limestone quarry that has eaten most of a hillside, a small museum, and one of the bitterest labour disputes in the history of British Columbia.

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Blubber Bay: What the Name Records

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. Texada is one of the Northern Gulf Islands, a long spine of rock lying across Malaspina Strait from Powell River, with the open Strait of Georgia along its western shore. In the era when whaling stations worked this coast, Blubber Bay offered what such an operation needed: deep w...

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Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Blubber Bay: The Island Is the Product

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. What replaced whaling was an industry with an even simpler logic: the island itself is the commodity. Texada holds enormous reserves of limestone, and Blubber Bay became a quarry town where the pits, offices and workings climb the hill directly behind the dock. On the north rim o...

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Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Blubber Bay: Eleven Months

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. In the late 1930s Blubber Bay belonged to the Pacific Lime Company, and its roughly 156 workers had already tested the company once. A six-week walkout won a modest wage adjustment and a promise that union activists would not be singled out. As soon as production resumed, the com...

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Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Blubber Bay: Above the Ferry Landing

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. The ferry from Powell River still crosses Malaspina Strait and lands at Blubber Bay, and most people who step off it drive straight through, heading south toward Van Anda and the rest of Texada. Those who stop find a small store and, above the landing, a museum and archives where...

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Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0