Qualla: Honeymoon Bay, British Columbia

Honeymoon Bay, British Columbia: 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 town is named after a wedding that never took place. Sometime in the early settlement years, a young bachelor living on this stretch of Cowichan Lake announced to his neighbours that he was sailing back to England to find a wife. The bay got its name from the announcement. He never came back. Nobody recorded who he was or what happened to him, and the story survives only as an origin myth attached to a name that has outlasted almost everything else here, including the mill that built the houses and the community that filled them. Honeymoon Bay sits on the western shore of the lake's south end, about 75 kilometres northwest of Victoria, with roughly 580 residents at the last count in 2011.

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Honeymoon Bay, British Columbia: Clearing Ground With Oxen

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. Henry March arrived in 1887 and is generally counted as the first resident. He cleared the March farm out of rainforest using horses and oxen, which in this country meant fighting Douglas fir stumps the size of small rooms on ground that wants to be forest and will become forest ...

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Honeymoon Bay, British Columbia: The Company Built the Houses

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. In 1947, Western Forest Industries completed the homes of the original Honeymoon Bay townsite. That sentence describes something more specific than it sounds. This was a company town in the full sense, where the employer built the street grid, the dwellings, and the reason to be ...

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Honeymoon Bay, British Columbia: The Gurdwara and the Mill Gate

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. For more than 130 years, Sikh Canadians have been part of the Cowichan Valley, and the mill towns around Cowichan Lake were among the strongest concentrations of that community in British Columbia. Punjabi workers took jobs in the sawmills from the early twentieth century onward,...

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Honeymoon Bay, British Columbia: Pink Fawn Lilies in Second Growth

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. What remained after the mill was the place itself, which turned out to be worth something on its own terms. Gordon Bay Provincial Park was established here on September 18, 1969, 104 hectares of lakeshore that fills with campers every summer. A short walk away is the Honeymoon Ba...

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Honeymoon Bay, British Columbia: After the Whistle

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. Honeymoon Bay today is a village that outlived its purpose and had to invent another one. The economy runs on recreation, retirement, and the steady trickle of people who decide that a small settlement on a long green lake with mountains at both ends is worth the drive. Cowichan ...

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