Qualla: Vendovi Island

Vendovi Island: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 2000 census recorded a population of two on Vendovi Island. Two hundred and twenty acres of forest and shoreline in the San Juans, and two people to occupy it. The island sits across Samish Bay from the mainland of Skagit County, tucked between Guemes Island and Lummi Island in a part of the archipelago the ferries do not serve. Its name comes from ten thousand kilometres away, from a Fijian high chief called Ro Veidovi, and how a Washington island came to carry it is the most interesting thing about the place.

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Vendovi Island: A Name Carried Across an Ocean

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the early 1840s the United States Exploring Expedition, commanded by Charles Wilkes, swept through the Pacific charting islands and collecting specimens, and it eventually worked its way into these northern waters, where Wilkes named a great deal of what he saw. Many of the na...

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Vendovi Island: Two Hundred and Twenty Acres

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The geography is compact: 217 acres of land, an island small enough to walk end to end in an afternoon. It lies in Skagit County rather than San Juan County, an administrative quirk that follows from its position on the eastern edge of the archipelago, closer to the mainland than...

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Vendovi Island: Privately Held

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Before 2010, Vendovi was private property, held by the family of John Fluke Sr. A privately owned island in the San Juans is a particular kind of possession. It is not merely land; it is the absence of neighbours, the absence of a road, the absence of anyone arriving unannounced....

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Vendovi Island: Handing It On

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In December 2010 the family sold the island to the San Juan Preservation Trust, a land trust whose work is the conservation of open space across the archipelago. That transaction changed the island's future rather than its appearance. Under a trust, the forest is not going to be ...

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Vendovi Island: What It Is Now

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Vendovi today is a wooded island with a protected shoreline, reachable only by water, in a stretch of the Salish Sea busy with traffic that mostly passes it by. The ferries run elsewhere. The name on the chart still belongs to a man from Fiji who was carried here by an American n...

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