Pitt Lake Kayaking Trip

June 13, 2026June 8, 2026 / Maria / Leave a comment

We spent 3 days kayaking on Pitt Lake in late April 2026 and I am so excited to write about it. I live in Coquitlam, so Pitt Lake is only a 30 minute drive from my house and it’s only within the last 3-4 years that I’ve started to explore this area. If you live in Pitt Meadows or Maple Ridge, you’re probably already aware that there’s lots of great hiking in the wetland area south of the lake. There’s a huge dike network along the Pitt River and throughout the wetlands. It’s completely flat, so it’s great for running and dog walking.

More recently, we’ve spent more time paddling along Widgeon Creek. I was intimidated by this trip for years because I was afraid of crossing the Pitt River, which can have fast currents. Access to Widgeon is located at the mouth of Pitt Lake, so you have to park at the lake and paddle across the Pitt River to access Widgeon Marsh. I’ve done the trip 4-5 times in the past two years and I’ve written about it as a day trip and an overnight experience. But despite so many trips to Widgeon, I’d still hadn’t paddled Pitt Lake.

Considering how easy it is to access Pitt Lake, it’s a surprisingly challenging lake to explore. I think it’s well known in power boating communities, but not frequently used by the general public. There are no walking trails around the lake, save for the dike trail at the foot. I was interested to learn that there is a pretty big cabin network spread out around the lake and the cabin owners seem to be some of the biggest users of the lake.

However, if you’re not lucky enough to own a cabin on the lake or a motorized boat, you can still explore the lake the old fashioned hand-powered way. Seth and I do most of our kayaking in the Spring, so this year, we decided to drive up to the lake after work on Friday to do a 2-night camping trip. Even though it was late April, we had fantastic weather and because it was so early in the season, we were the only people at the campsite both nights!

But first, let’s talk about getting there. The east side of Pitt Lake is actually located in Golden Ears Provincial Park, which means that there are two FCFS marine-accessible campgrounds on the east side of the lake; Raven Creek and Osprey Creek. These sites can be booked through camping.bcparks.ca (backcountry registration, not reservation). Camping permits are available 2 weeks before your trip and it’s $5 per person, per night. There is no limit on the number of permits sold.

It’s ~9km of paddling to get to Raven Creek and another ~7-8km to Osprey Creek. Since we were paddling after work, our plan was to spend both nights at Raven Creek and explore further up the lake as a day trip on Saturday. We arrived at the parking lot around 4:30pm and launched our boats shortly after 5pm. In the summer, you have to pay for parking, but the parking fees were not in effect when we visited. There were lots of people launching powerboats from the boat launch at the same time we were packing our kayaks, but we were the only paddlers. None of the people in powerboats were heading to Raven Creek, so I assume they all had cabins on the lake.

The trick with Pitt Lake is that it’s a tidally influenced lake. The water quality at Raven Creek is freshwater, but because the Pitt River connects to the Fraser River, which connects to the ocean, the tides influence the water level. For the most part, this is a concern for powerboats rather than paddleboats, but because the tide was super low when we started kayaking, it did impact us as well. The southern part of the lake is extremely shallow, so if you’re in a motorized boat, you have to follow the navigation channel. Our plan was to paddle the dike to the east side of the lake, and then follow the shoreline up to the campsite.

If you check on a GPS or marine map, you can see that the navigation channel goes right up the middle of the lake almost the entire way to Raven Creek. We didn’t want to get stuck paddling in the middle of the lake, so we planned to follow the shore, but you can see on my GPS image below that there is a lot of shallow wetland in this area as well, so we were forced to follow the navigation channel, until we could cross over the shallower section to get to deeper water along the shore. The tide was much higher on the way back, so you can see from my GPS track that we didn’t have any issues with water depth on the way back.

The fact that this area is so shallow did help us on Friday evening. Most of the lakes in this region have a reputation for getting pretty windy in the afternoon. This has been my experience in Indian Arm as well, so I’m used to windy conditions between noon and 6pm. However, after 6pm, the wind usually dies down, which is what I was hoping for at Pitt Lake. Unfortunately, Pitt Lake stayed windy pretty much until sunset. It did get calmer overnight, but there was a decent amount of wind on the lake when we started paddling. The shallow water helped to kill some of the wind, though we did enjoy having a tailwind to push us up to the campsite.

It took us 2 hours and 10 minutes to paddle to the campsite on Friday night and 1 hour and 45 minutes to paddle back on Sunday morning in dead flat conditions. Unfortunately, there’s not really anywhere to take a break along this entire stretch. It’s a common complaint that I have about paddling when there’s so much private property. I know you can’t own the beach, but it still feels awkward landing your boat on someone’s front lawn, even though that’s the only option available sometimes. On Pitt Lake, there’s not many properties between the dike and Raven Creek, so be prepared to just paddle the whole way to Raven Creek.

Raven Creek is located on a headland, so you can see it in the distance for most of the paddle. The campsite is located on the north side, so you will have to paddle around the entire headland to get there, but there are lots of places to take a break. Like I said, we were the only people at the campsite. Despite there being tons of spaces to land, there’s not a lot of places to camp because of the tidal influence. If the tide is low, which it was when we arrived, do not assume you can set up anywhere on the beach. Find the high tide line and make sure you set up behind it. Most of the campsites are located in the woods at the back of the beach, but we were able to find one really nice beach site since we were the people there.

Like I said, we had beautiful weather for the entire weekend. It wasn’t super hot because it was still April, but it was sunny the whole time we were out. We set up our tent and ate supper and then spent the rest of the evening on the beach, watching the sunset and then having a campfire. We brought our firewood with us, but there was a lot of dead wood around the beach as well, likely because it was so early in the season.

We got up early on Saturday to go paddling for the day, because as always, I was worried about the wind. Given how windy it had been on our paddle in, and knowing that we’d have a headwind on the way back to the campsite in the afternoon, I wanted to get most of our paddling done in the morning. We had a simple breakfast and then started paddling north along the shoreline. It was a beautiful day and the water was pretty flat, making for really enjoyable conditions. On a normal day, we probably would have decided to paddle all the way to Osprey Creek and back, but I’ve been battling a knee injury this year that makes it a little more challenging to kayak, so we decided to paddle up to Little Goose Island instead, which ended up being ~12km of paddling.

There’s no private properties along the shoreline until you get to Little Goose Island, but there still isn’t really anywhere to pull out. There’s a small beach before you reach the line of properties in the bay, 4km from Raven Creek, and we decided to stop there for a break. We weren’t sure if there would be somewhere to pull out on Goose Island, but if you go around the back side of the island, there are 2 small little coves where you can get out of the boat. We couldn’t land anywhere, but the water was shallow enough that it was fine. We were also tucked away from the houses in the little cove and we were able to go for a quick swim.

We could also walk up onto a little headland on the island that had beautiful views of the lake. I wanted to keep paddling further because the water was so calm, but I didn’t want to further injure my knee, so we decided to head back, stopping at the same beach for another break. It was an excellent decision because we got back to Raven Creek almost exactly at 1pm, which was precisely when the wind came up. It got significantly windier in the afternoon, to the point that we could see whitecaps in the middle of the lake, so I was glad that we came back when we did.

We spent the rest of the day relaxing on the beach and it was incredibly enjoyable. A few day users stopped by to hang out for a few hours, but they all disappeared back to their boats by suppertime. The trip was the same weekend that Noah Kahan released his new album, so I spent the entire afternoon listening to it on the beach while drinking iced tea. I’m pretty sure is the exact way Noah intended for an album called The Great Divide to be listened to. Usually we like to go out for a sunset paddle, but again, the wind never really died down again until sunset, so instead we just enjoyed our supper and the solitude, having another campfire as the stars came out.

We got up early again to paddle out before the wind came up and we had a really nice flat paddle with some kingfishers, who seemed to follow us the entire way back down the lake. The boat launch was much busier than when we left with day users heading over to Widgeon Creek. A lot of people rent boats to go to Widgeon, which I think is fine, but I don’t recommend this for Pitt Lake unless you know what you’re doing. There were a few canoers struggling to cross the Pitt River and we talked to the guys who rent the boats and they said that despite giving detailed instructions, a lot of people still struggle and have had to be rescued on more than one occasion. Crossing the Pitt River is the biggest challenge visiting Widgeon Creek, but the rest of the trip isn’t too challenging. Pitt Lake is a whole different beast with the wind, so I wouldn’t recommend it without prior experience.

But overall, this was a fantastic trip for us. Even though this can be a busy late, I loved the solitude that we got in April. The nice weather definitely made a big difference and I’d be willing to do the trip again. I really liked the campsite and the lake. Getting up to paddle early was probably the best decision that we made. I’d love to go back and explore as far as Osprey Creek, or even to the end of the lake. We got back to the boat launch before 11am and there were two guys launching a double kayak that were planning to go all the way to the end of the lake and back, which I thought was overly ambitious. I think next time, I’ll try to hit Osprey Creek for two nights instead. Either way, I recommend this trip for intermediate paddlers.

Desolation Sound Kayak Trip Part II

June 14, 2023August 13, 2024 / Maria / 7 Comments

Despite the name change in the blog title, this post is a continuation of my last post about Copeland Islands Marine Park, as I visited both parks in the same trip. Read Part 1 here.

I will admit that the wind gave me a lot of anxiety on this trip. I’m definitely a fair weather paddler, and while I’ve been out in less-than-favourable conditions, I’ve never paddled in outright dangerous conditions. It was surprisingly windy overnight, which made me a bit nervous for our second day of paddling, but the wind forecast wasn’t that high and it did calm down throughout the day. I’m used to the wind being calm in the morning and coming up in the afternoon, so that was an interesting change to have it reversed.

We still got up reasonably early (7am) because we wanted to launch the boats while the tide was still high. Once the tide starts to go down, you lose the channel exit from our campsite and it adds a bit of extra paddling, plus you have to load the boats and gear further down the beach.

Fortunately, our timing was right on and we paddled out through the channel around 9am with just enough clearance to get over the newly forming beach. We crossed back over to the Malaspina Peninsula and said good-bye to the Copeland Islands as we made our way to Desolation Sound. There were some cool cliff features along the way, just past Bliss Landing, and we quickly arrived at Sarah Point, which marks the beginning of both Desolation Sound Marine Park and the Sunshine Coast Trail. It was a bit of a bittersweet moment for me as I have very fond memories of hiking the SCT last year and I loved seeing the Sarah Point hut again.

We had a quick break further along the beach at Sarah Point before continuing around the headland to Feather Cove, which is also on the SCT. It got a little windier as we rounded Sarah Point, but nothing to be concerned about. We spotted our second sea lion and then took in our first glimpse of the jaw-dropping beauty of Desolation Sound. I wasn’t able to successfully identify the mountains, but there are some gorgeous snow capped peaks in the distance as you first enter the Sound.

We took another short break at Feather Cove before crossing Okeover Inlet to Zephine Head. The Inlet crossing was fine and the tide was rapidly dropping, so we were able to pull out at a beach just around the Head. At high tide, you might have to continue into Galley Bay for a pull-out though. We had our lunch there and since the conditions were favourable, we decided to do a direct crossing to Mink Island.

It’s about a 3km paddle from Zephine Head to Mink Island in open water. We tried to stay close to one another on the crossing, but the wind definitely picks up the further out you get, so I finally dropped my rudder and that helped me maintain my course a lot easier. Seth is pretty opposed to his rudder and never uses it, so he had some trouble staying on track. We managed to correct this the following day (which was windier), by both dropping our rudders and having Seth paddle directly behind me (since I’m the slower paddler) instead of trying to paddle side by side. Whenever we go side by side we tend to get separated, so this system worked better for us.

That said, it was still a pretty good crossing. The wind was low and we didn’t have any trouble making it over to Mink Island. Once we got to Mink Island, we had the wind working with us, so that was nice. Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of good looking places to stop along the island, so we powered around the corner of the little arm on Mink Island (sorry I don’t know the name) and had a nice rest in the sheltered bay.

From there it’s not much further to the Curme Islands, which are the most popular attraction in the park, at least as far as I can tell. At the end of Mink Island, there are 3 small islands: South Curme, East Curme, and West Curme. The water was super calm at the end of Mink and around the Curme Islands, so we did a little paddle around each island. It was Seth’s turn to pick our site and he opted for East Curme Island, which I think was an excellent choice!

West Curme Island was really busy when we arrived, so I think that one might be the most popular. There was just one group on both East and South Curme, though a lot of people showed up to South Curme by motor boat later in the evening. But no one else joined us on East Curme, so it was just us and the other group (which is surprising considering it is the biggest of the 3 islands). We had a lovely site looking out to South Curme and Bold Head, and climbing up to the top of the island, another nice view looking down at West Curme.

The tide was very low when we arrived again, but in contrast to North Copeland Island, it was a more challenging landing. It wasn’t hard at low tide, but it’s a bit of a climb up to the island and at high tide, there’s no beach at all. There was just enough room for 4 kayaks between us and the other group, so I’m not sure where everyone stores their boats when the campsite is full.

Instead of dragging the boats up the rocks, we opted to tie them on and let the tide slowly float them up to the landing. It worked really well and when the water reached high tide around sunset, we popped them up on the bank.

After unloading the boats, we were really warm, so we opted to go for a swim almost immediately. Like Copeland, the water was incredibly warm, though there was a lot of seaweed floating around with the low tide. Even Seth went for a swim and we were in the water for the better part of a half hour. We had landed on the island around 2:30pm, and after our swim, I spent the rest of the day doing absolutely nothing. Seth had a nap and I just enjoyed drinking my ice tea and watching the seals play while the tide came up.

Seth wasn’t as excited about a sunset paddle on this day, but I convinced him to go out for a half hour since you can’t really see the sunset from East Curme. The water was calm again and it was approaching high tide, so we paddled in and around all the islands before calling it a night. We slept with the fly off again and set our alarms for 6am to get an earlier start on the following day.

This was on account of those winds I mentioned earlier that were making me anxious. The wind was supposed to come up a lot on our 3rd day and I was nervous about the big open water crossing. We discussed it in the evening and decided we would take the long route back to our next campsite. There’s two benefits to this. The first is that you get to explore new terrain by circling Desolation Sound from the other side instead of doing the same crossing back along Mink Island. The second is that you avoid the big 3km open crossing, instead doing a 0.5km crossing from East Curme to Otter Island, and then a second 1km crossing across Tenedos Bay. The other benefit is that these two crossings are done at the start of your paddle, which would be early morning for us, resulting in less wind.

Here’s a screenshot of our 2 paddling routes for some context. I’ll cover the rest of the trip in the Part III!

Kayaking Sechelt Inlet

August 28, 2019August 30, 2019 / Maria / 4 Comments

In the last year, along side all our other hobbies, Seth and I decided to start kayaking. We went on our first trip last year over the Canada Day weekend to Sechelt Inlet, and we’re planning a trip to Pender Island for the upcoming Labour Day weekend. I actually wrote this post last year after our trip to Sechelt, but for some reason I never actually got around to posting it (I admit, it takes me a really long time to upload photos and that’s what usually holds up my posts, not the writing). So here’s the post I wrote last year about that trip – hoping to follow it up with a post about our upcoming trip!

I don’t mind carrying a big backpack, but Seth hates it. He likes day hiking and camping, but as soon as you strap a pack on him he loses all interest. So we decided to try a kayaking trip so that we could get into the wilderness without Seth having to lug all his gear with him. I’ve heard Indian Arm is a great place for kayak trips, and it’s right next to Vancouver, but we decided to go a little farther away and started with a 2 night trip in Sechelt Inlet on the Sunshine Coast.

Before I tell you about the trip though, I have to recommend taking the beginner kayaking course from Paddle Canada before you attempt any kayak adventures. Seth and I have both been kayaking before, but I’m so glad we took the introductory course because we were going deep into the wilderness and I’m really glad we learned some basic paddling skills and how to save ourselves in an emergency. We did a 2 day course with West Beach Paddle in White Rock and I would highly recommend them. We’re thinking of going back next year to do the next level because they were so fabulous. We learned a ton of skills and how to rescue each other in the event that we tipped our kayaks. Safety first everyone!

Our first take-away from the course was that we wanted single kayaks. Doubles are so much cheaper, but they also involve a lot of coordination. Me and Seth are really different people and I have a bit of a control complex, so I’m glad we each had our own boat. I think it made for a much more enjoyable trip.

We took the ferry over to the Sunshine Coast early on Saturday morning and drove straight to Sechelt to get our kayak rentals. I was a little concerned about getting all our gear in the kayak, but those things are surprisingly large and we even had extra space in the compartments. It did take a little bit of coordination and jigsaw skills to make everything fit though, I’d recommend many small bags, instead of few big ones. The hardest thing to fit in was our 20L water jug because we brought all our water with us (although we didn’t even use half of the water we brought).

It was overcast and a little rainy when we started, but fortunately the wind was at our backs so we didn’t have too hard a go. Sechelt Inlet is really interesting because it’s only connected to the ocean through one small channel, so you’d think it would be pretty calm in there, but they can actually get some pretty strong headwinds up the channel. There’s also a ton of campsites in the inlet, but we didn’t want to push ourselves too far on our first trip, so we chose Nine Mile Beach as our camping destination since it was only about a 2 hour paddle.

We had a pretty leisurely trip out and stopped at Oyster Beach for our lunch. Nine Mile Beach is the biggest campsite I believe, which is why we picked it, but everyone else seemed to have the same idea and it was quite busy, so I’d maybe even recommend going for one of the smaller ones. I assumed they’d be full since they were so small, but they were actually empty. Halfway Beach is across the inlet from Nine Mile Beach and it is about the same size, but there were definitely less people staying there because it can be a lot of work crossing the inlet depending on the weather.

No fear though, we managed to get a great site at Nine Mile Beach! Most of the campsites are back in the woods, but we went down to the far end of the beach where there were less crowds and managed to find a small site at the very end just big enough for our tent and gear, with a great view of the beach. So we hauled our kayaks up above the high water line and set up camp.

The sun never really managed to come out on Saturday, but it did stop raining before we got to the beach and we spent the rest of the day chilling. I read about half a book and Seth (the biologist) had a great time exploring the low tide and flipping over rocks. I expected to see wildlife while we were out there, but I was surprised by just how much wildlife we saw! It was like a nature zoo! While we were eating dinner the birds gave us a great show. There were two seagulls that were hanging around digging up shellfish (cockles according to Seth) and they kept digging them out of the sand and then flying up high to drop them on the rocks to get to the meat inside. Plus, two black oyster catchers also showed up looking for mussels for supper, which thrilled Seth because they are the birds he is studying for his Masters and he doesn’t get that many opportunities to see them in the wild.

The highlight though didn’t come until nighttime. We heard some rumours you could see bio-luminescence in the water in Sechelt Inlet and our neighbour gave us a tip that you have to actually move to water to see it (we never would have figured this out ourselves). So we got up at 2am and fortunately the wind had totally died off and the water was very still, so we moved our paddles through the water and sure enough it totally lit up with glowing organisms! It was very cool! I was tempted to go swimming in it, but it was just too cold.

The weather cleared up a lot for us on Day 2 and the sun came out! There was still quite a bit of wind when we took off in the morning, but again, it was at our backs. Sechelt inlet has 2 side channels, Salmon Inlet and Narrows Inlet. Our main goal of the trip was to cross Salmon Inlet and visit Kunechin Islets and Kunechin Point. On a map it doesn’t look that intense, but it actually is a fair paddle to cross any of the inlets. It wasn’t bad on the way over with the wind at our backs, but I was a little nervous about coming back.

We wanted to visit Kunechin Islets because they are a protected seabird sanctuary and Seth wanted to see some seabirds. There weren’t actually that many birds around, but we definitely weren’t disappointed. We saw several eagles in and around the islet, as well as a half dozen oyster catchers (and lots of seagulls). We’re probably a bit partial to oyster catchers since Seth’s been studying them for years, but they really are precious! They sound like squeak toys and we enjoyed watching them.

The highlight for me though was the seal colony! Seth counted about 65 seals sunbathing on the rock when we approached. We tried to stay far enough away from the seals to not bother them, but most of them abandoned the rock into the water as soon as they saw us approaching (do feel a bit bad about this, but we really didn’t get that close). They were funny though because they all just watched us from the water with their little heads poking up. It was hilarious, but also a little foreboding because of the sheer number of them!

We had lunch on Kunechin point, which in my opinion had the best view and campsite. It’s located a little bit up on a hill and looks up both Salmon Inlet and Sechelt Inlet. It was empty when we were there, but there’s only 2 campsites there and some kayakers who were departing when we arrived informed us it had been totally full the previous night. I kind of wish we’d stayed there, but there’s very little beach at this campsite, so Seth preferred Nine Mile Beach.

Luckily for us, the wind dropped down entirely after lunch and we decided to paddle across Sechelt Inlet and visit Halfway Beach. The map of Sechelt Inlet is definitely deceiving and the crossing is a lot farther than it looks, but with the wind dropped down, it wasn’t a hard paddle. I really liked Halfway Beach – it has a lot of campsites and it’s brighter than the wooded campsites at Nine Mile Beach (and less busy), but again, Seth still thought that Nine Mile Beach was the best for wildlife. We collected some windfall branches in the forest to take back with us for a campfire (pre-fireban!) because Nine Mile Beach has pretty much been picked dry.

By the time we kayaked back across the inlet one more time it was about 3:30pm and we decided to take it easy for the rest of the evening. I had a really quick dip in the ocean, but I mostly just relaxed and did some reading while Seth did some more beachcombing. We were surprised just before dinner though by a mountain storm.

I feel like I’ve gotten a lot more experience with mountain storms this year. They kind of swing in out of nowhere and they don’t really last very long, but they can dump some pretty intense rain on you. We tried to wait it out in the tent, but we were pretty hungry, so we set up a tarp shelter and cooked our dinner while watching the rain clouds move up and down the inlet. We were concerned we weren’t going to get to have our campfire afterall, but the rain finally stopped after about 2 hours and Seth got a lovely campfire going for us while I watched one of the most intense sunsets over the mountains. It was so red it honestly kind of looked like the trees were on fire!

We finished the trip on Monday with a pretty leisurely paddle back to rental company. We got lucky again in that the water was dead calm when we started our kayak back. The wind did start to pick up a little in some sections on the way though and it was a great lesson in how much harder a little headwind can make a paddle. Overall though, nothing too strenuous.

So our first kayak trip was a huge success and I think it’s something we’ll definitely start doing a least once a year. Personally I’m still more of a fan of backpacking, but I really enjoyed getting on the water and trying something new! We definitely saw a lot more wildlife in the kayak and the bio-luminescence was one of the highlights for me!

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