Discovery Bay: Due for Rediscovery
An unusual phenomenon appeared on the surface of Discovery Bay the other day -- Boats. Not just one or two, but a veritable fleet of a dozen or so sailboats, their sails framed by the forested shores and snowy Olympic peaks.
They weren’t exactly racing yachts, but a rather motley assemblage of local sailors who turned out for the first-ever Cape George Regatta. But that was still more sails at one time than anybody has seen on Discovery Bay in a very long time. This happened weeks ago, and people here still talk about it. 
Fact is, not much happens out here on Disco Bay. There are homes and barns scattered along 16 miles of shoreline, from Cape George down to old Port Discovery and back to Diamond Point. Highway 101 skirts its southern shores. And there’s that fellow at the south end who likes to blow things up now and then.
But most of the time, the closest thing to excitement out here are the seagulls and pigeon guillemots who show up each spring to nest on Protection Island. Compared to big cities like Port Townsend, Discovery Bay is something of a backwater. It’s a deep, glacial fjord between forested walls, extending eight miles to the foothills of the Olympic Mountains, its entrance guarded by Protection Island.
Every year, thousands of boaters cruise through Admiralty Inlet, just five miles to the east. But few venture into the bay. We’re just a bit out of the way and, when boats do pass nearby, they’re usually in a hurry to get somewhere else before the weather turns.
This wasn’t always so. Once upon a time, Discovery Bay was more or less the Center of the Puget Sound Universe. This is because, in the spring of 1792, George Vancouver and his sea-weary crew sailed off the Pacific into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, making their way along the starboard shore until, on May 2, they anchored in a deep, broad harbor that he named Port Discovery, for his trusty ship.
“A picture so pleasing could not fail to call to our remembrance certain delightful and beloved situations in Old England,” he wrote in his journal. “A variety of stately forest trees pleasingly clothed its eminences and chequered the valleys, presenting extensive spaces that wore the appearance of having been cleared by art.”
He was particularly impressed by the strategic placement of the island. “Had this insular production of nature been designed by the most able engineer, it could not have been placed more happily.”
For nearly three weeks the ship remained at anchor near Carr Point, halfway down the bay. While much of the crew worked at repairing sails and spars, the skipper and others set out in small boats, exploring Port Townsend, Hood Canal and beyond. Still others set up camp at the mouth of a stream, taking celestial sightings and brewing “spruce beer,” a concoction of fir needles, water, molasses and yeast.
Eventually, of course, they sailed on. But Vancouver’s published journals and maps placed the world’s spotlight on what became Discovery Bay, which offered safe anchorage and ample timber and steep shores that enabled giant logs to be moved down to the water. By the 1850s, there was a major mill at Port Discovery, with scores of workers, saloons and more. In one year, that mill produced some 18 million board feet of fir and cedar, most of it bound for the Bay Area, where old San Francisco was framed with our timber.
In time, however, the trees were gone and the loggers moved on. In the 1890s, the government built a quarantine station at Diamond Point, which was the subject of recurring rumors of escaped lepers orbubonic plague. That station continued to inspect arriving ships well into the 1920s.
Then things got very quiet.
For those of us who live here, that’s fine. Even at the height of boating season, this “picture so pleasing” is all ours. But, for the record, boaters are welcome. There is decent holding ground in about 30 feet of water along the western shores, next to a small and under-used boat ramp at Gardiner; or on the eastern shore in the lee of Beckett Point. These are fair-weather anchorages, because either spot is prone to stiff southerlies. There is good beachcombing at low tide, especially at extreme low tides, when folks make their way out to “Glass Beach,” the old city dump near McCurdy Point.
While here, you’ll want to circumnavigate Protection Island. It’s strictly off-limits to visitors, but the adjacent waters are rich with whimsical puffins and rhinoceros auklets, harbor seals and the occasional elephant seal. Keep an eye out for the rustic cabin perched atop the southwest bluff, where Marty Bluewater holds out as the last resident of an island otherwise restored to Mother .jpg)
Nature. But be aware: There is virtually no public shoreline here. The tiny Cape George Marina is strictly private, and its entrance is dangerously shallow at low tides. There is no fuel, no restaurant, no pub to be found.
So why come at all? Because it’s here, and nobody else is. And because, with the aid of Vancouver’s journals, a voyage into Discovery Bay is a journey in time. Vancouver and company anchored here longer than any other spot on Puget Sound, and the journals offer detailed descriptions of the land and seascape as it looked for untold thousands of years before we started to change it.
Archibald Menzies, the Scottish naturalist who sailed with Vancouver, explored the shoreline and forest floor, and offered the first descriptions of the Douglas fir, madrona, Olympic oyster and scores more plants and animals. His descriptions, and those of Vancouver, offer a sort of biological baseline by which to assess the impacts of two centuries of development that have profoundly changed most of Puget Sound….
But not Discovery Bay.
