The idea was old before it was built. In 1889 Amor De Cosmos, by then a former premier of British Columbia, became the first person known to have publicly proposed Swartz Bay as a workable ferry terminal for connections to the Lower Mainland. Nobody acted on it for seven decades. When the search for a site north of Victoria finally got serious in 1959, the obvious alternative was Sidney, where facilities already handled the San Juan Islands run. Sidney lost on two counts: its waters were not sheltered enough, and the extra distance meant longer crossings and more fuel burned on every sailing. Swartz Bay won partly because a small private dock, run by the Gulf Islands Ferry Company, was already operating there. De Cosmos had been right, which he did not live to see.

Today the terminal occupies 22.7 hectares and works five berths. The heavy engineering is mostly invisible to anyone in the queue, but it matters: in 2006 the Berth 2 project replaced ageing marine structures and an old counter-weighted ramp lift with a $25 million floating berth that rises and falls with the tide instead of being winched against it. A broader renovation had already gone through in the mid-1990s. From here BC Ferries runs the main crossing to Tsawwassen on the mainland along with service to all the major southern Gulf Islands, and Seaspan Ferries operates a freight terminal on the same water - the less photogenic half of what keeps the island supplied.

Swartz Bay is where the highway stops, which gives the place its particular character: everyone arriving is on their way to somewhere across water. Victoria International Airport is about ten minutes down Highway 17, and transit Route 70 runs an express bus into downtown Victoria in roughly an hour. For anyone in no hurry at all, the Lochside Regional Trail runs 29 kilometres south from here to the city, following the old rail grade through farmland and along the shoreline. Inside the main building there is a cafeteria and a coffee shop, and through the warmer months local artisans set up kiosks in the concourse. One small distinction the terminal holds: it is the only major southern terminal in the BC Ferries system with no traffic signal at its entrance or exit. The queue simply flows.

It is easy to treat the crossing as scenery - and it is spectacular scenery, threading out past the Gulf Islands with the Coast Mountains ahead. But these are busy, constrained waters shared by vessels of wildly different sizes, and the terminal's history includes the reminder. On 14 September 2000, just off Swartz Bay, the Spirit of Vancouver Island struck a pleasure craft and two people were killed. Ferry crews on this route run it hundreds of times a year in fog, in wind, in December darkness, threading between islands and small boats on a schedule. The queue on the tarmac, the gulls on the pilings, the announcement over the tannoy - all of it rests on that being done properly, every single sailing.