--- title: "Orca Camp: the comfortable way to sleep on a beach" description: "A tented base camp on a beach in Johnstone Strait where the hard parts are done for you. Guided ocean paddles that run like clockwork, meals cooked fresh, cookies and coffee whenever you want them, a wood-fired hot tub and a sauna on the shore, a campfire under real stars, and a crew who seem glad you came. Bring yourself, some clothes and a camera." author: "Ben Taft" published: "2026-09-08" updated: "2026-09-20" canonical: "https://wildernessledger.com/guides/canvas-beside-robson-bight" about: - "Wildcoast Adventures: https://wildernessledger.com/experience/wildcoast-adventures" --- # Orca Camp: the comfortable way to sleep on a beach > A tented base camp on a beach in Johnstone Strait where the hard parts are done for you. Guided ocean paddles that run like clockwork, meals cooked fresh, cookies and coffee whenever you want them, a wood-fired hot tub and a sauna on the shore, a campfire under real stars, and a crew who seem glad you came. Bring yourself, some clothes and a camera. Words, photography and film by Ben Taft. Published 8 September 2026, updated 20 September 2026. Canonical page: https://wildernessledger.com/guides/canvas-beside-robson-bight Photograph: Group of sea kayakers paddling below a misty rainforest shoreline in Johnstone Strait Robson Bight, the Michael Bigg Ecological Reserve, is a bay and a length of gravel shoreline on the south side of Johnstone Strait. It has been a reserve since 1982 because the northern resident orca come there to rub their bodies on the smooth stones in the shallows. It is the only reliable rubbing-beach complex known anywhere. Whales travel to it the way people travel to a hot spring. [Wildcoast Adventures](https://wildernessledger.com/experience/wildcoast-adventures) pitches its camp right beside it, and in August they asked me up for four nights to give the place a fresh look: a full [360° virtual tour of the camp](https://demo.360immersion.com/wildcoastadventures/2026-orcacamp-preview/), aerials of the beach and the strait, and the people who make a week there what it is. Photograph: Aerial view of Orca Camp on the forested shoreline of Johnstone Strait Caption: The whole camp from three hundred feet. Everything you can see was barged in, and will be taken out again. You cannot drive here and you cannot leave early. That single fact does more for a trip than any amount of thread count. The morning was easy in a way I had not expected. Parking at the Campbell River dock is free, check-in at the office took about four minutes, and there was coffee at the briefing. We left in sunshine on a flat sea. The one instruction that stuck was to wear shoes we did not mind soaking, because there is no dock at the other end and the last twenty metres are done in a rowboat. I had the camera out before we cleared the harbour. Two and a half hours later I was standing on a pebble beach in wet shoes, watching my bags come ashore. ## The camp Photograph: Hemlock House, a canvas-walled cabin on a timber frame in the rainforest, two guests at its door Caption: Hemlock House. The tents have names. The tents ### An Ewok village in the forest That was my first thought walking up off the beach, and I have not found a better description since. Canvas tents on raised platforms, strung through the trees on boardwalks, each one tucked into a gap rather than a clearing. The beds are properly comfortable. There is power at the tents, which for anyone arriving with three days of batteries to keep alive is not a small thing. The camp is built in the gaps between old-growth hemlock and cedar, which is why it disappears from the water. You pass it at half a mile and see trees. Photograph: Orca Camp seen through old-growth forest on the shore of Johnstone Strait Caption: Nothing was felled to make room. Photograph: Orca Camp lit at dusk, with the wood-fired hot tub and sauna glowing among the trees Caption: Dusk at camp. Mornings came in misty and moody. The evenings paid it all back with sunsets I would have flown a long way for. Photograph: Two guests in the old-growth forest behind the camp, looking up at the trunks Caption: It reads as small from the water, and smaller from inside the forest. Photograph: A couple in the wood-fired hot tub at sunset, the strait and the far shore behind them Field note ### The comfort is the point The pitch here is simple, and it is the best argument the place makes. If you like being outside but you do not want to pack away a wet tent or think about dinner, everything is done for you. You bring yourself, some clothes and a camera. It is still canvas, the nights are still cool and the bathroom is still shared. But you can paddle for six hours, get properly cold, sit in a wood-fired tub until you are properly warm, eat a plated dinner, and be ready at seven the next morning. [Check availability](https://wildernessledger.com/experience/wildcoast-adventures#request-availability) Photograph: A couple resting their arms on the rim of the wood-fired hot tub among the trees Photograph: A guest on the sauna bench looking out through the porthole window at Johnstone Strait ## Heat, and where it comes from The tub and the sauna are both wood-fired, which means somebody has been thinking about your evening since the middle of the afternoon. That somebody is usually Bender, and by the second night you start noticing when the smoke goes up. The sauna has a porthole cut into the wall facing the water. I shot through it about eleven times over four nights and never quite got tired of it. On the one morning the fog lifted early, it was the best window on the beach. Photograph: Flames close up in the campfire after dark Caption: The stove, fed since mid-afternoon. Fire ### Heat until you cannot The stove in the sauna is wood, like the tub, and somebody has been thinking about your evening since the middle of the afternoon. The routine settles in by the second night: sit until the bench is too much, then out the door and down the pebbles. Photograph: The strait flat and pink at dusk, a swimmer in the water off the pebble beach Caption: Between rounds, the plunge is the strait itself, straight off the beach. Then water ### The plunge Go under, come up gasping, back to the bench. The strait sits at about ten degrees whatever the month, which is exactly cold enough to make the sauna feel earned and exactly warm enough that you go back in. Nobody times it. The fire does. > If wildlife is the reason you are going, take more days than I had, and accept that the rest is luck. > > Field note ## The people who make it work Bender is the camp host, and he has been here since the camp began. He keeps the operation running and, more to the point, keeps the sauna and the hot tub hot, which by the second evening feels like the most important job on the beach. The rest of the crew turns over with the seasons and the trips, so the names will be different when you go. What does not change is the kind of person it attracts. Nobody ends up on that beach by accident. Photograph: The camp chef reaching across plated dinners on the kitchen counter, a row of steel cups in front Photograph: Two guests raising glasses across the dinner table under the canvas dining shelter ## No walls The kitchen is a roof on posts. Nothing arrives after you do: every ingredient came up on the same boat you did, or on the barge before it, and there is no second chance at any of it. Out of that comes a plated three-course dinner, every night, for eighteen people, two and a half hours by boat from the nearest road. Photograph: The group around the beach fire after dark, the last light going off the strait behind Caption: The fire on the beach, after dark. No signal, no screens, and nowhere else to be. Camp life ### The two living rooms There is the beach, which is where the day gets talked about while it is still light, and there is the fire, which is where it gets talked about afterwards. That is the whole social architecture of the place, and it works better than anything with a roof on it. There is no mobile signal at Orca Camp. By the second evening nobody mentions it, which is the part I did not expect. People who had never met on Monday were finishing each other stories by Wednesday, because there was nothing else competing for the attention. ## How the pictures got made A confession that belongs in the open. The couple you see in a lot of these frames are my friends Adam and Ava. I brought them because a shoot like this needs people who are good on camera, and because a camp photographed empty tells you nothing about what it is like to be in one. They also tidied their own glamping tent before I was allowed near it, which is more than I would have done. The virtual tour was the awkward one. You cannot ask a working camp to hold still, so I shot most of it while the guests were out on day trips, and the rest by waiting for people to move out of frame. Some of the tour positions are drone positions rather than ground ones, and in a few of those I left the people in, because it worked better with them than without. Photograph: Guide briefing guests on the pebble beach before launching the kayaks Caption: Beach briefing. Everybody gets the same talk, every time. Nobody arrives knowing how to do this. That is the design and not a concession: eighteen guests at most, and a guide always within talking distance. ## The paddling, and the waiting Days work out from camp rather than moving it. This is a basecamp trip and not an expedition, so nothing is packed and unpacked. Morning, afternoon and sunset paddles are offered and you take the ones you want. Photograph: Sea kayaker paddling close along the shoreline of Johnstone Strait Photograph: Two sea kayakers passing a sunlit forested shore Photograph: Two guests on a driftwood log on the pebble beach, one looking through binoculars Caption: Hugging the shore, which is where the interesting things are. Most of the paddling looks like this, and the shoreline runs this way for miles. Watching for wildlife from the beach, which is as much of the day as the paddling is. Photograph: Sea kayakers paddling toward the setting sun on Johnstone Strait Caption: Evening paddle through kelp. This is the shot the whole trip was arranged around. Field note ### On the wildlife I saw sea lions and a humpback from the water taxi, and no orca, and it mattered less than I expected. You are out in the strait for days with old friends and new ones, eating better than you have any right to, with a tub waiting at the end of every one of them. If the whales stay away, the worst that happens is you have to come back. [See the experience](https://wildernessledger.com/experience/wildcoast-adventures) Photograph: Guests gathered around the campfire after dark Caption: The last fire of the trip. The strait goes flat and pink at the end of the day, and everybody stops talking. Nobody organises that. It just happens, at about the same time, every evening. ## Who it suits, and what to pack Anyone who likes being outdoors and would rather not earn it twice. No paddling experience, no camping skill and no gear are required, and the tent will be dry when you get back to it. The honest caveat is the weather. It can be cold out there and it can be foggy, in August as much as any other month, and the mornings start misty far more often than the brochure photographs suggest. Bring layers. Bring a beanie. I was glad of mine on all four nights. I would go back, and next time I would give it a week. Three days on that water is a fair holiday and not nearly enough of one. Photograph: Sunset over Johnstone Strait seen from the bluff above the camp Camp, and the strait beyond it Wildcoast has run this coast since 1997, and the camp goes in for a short season, with departures every three days from the first of July to the fourteenth of September, the last group out on the seventeenth. There are two other trips in the catalogue: a five-day Whales, Wildlife and Wilderness route through the Discovery Islands and Desolation Sound capped at ten guests, and a seven-day Whales and Bears itinerary that adds grizzly viewing in the Orford River valley. Orca Camp is the one the company is built around, and it is the one I would send someone on first. The full [Wildcoast Adventures listing](https://wildernessledger.com/experience/wildcoast-adventures) has the season dates, the published prices, the virtual tour of the camp and the film, and a way to ask about the weeks that are still open. ## Questions **How do you get to Orca Camp?** A water taxi leaves Campbell River at half past seven in the morning and runs about two and a half hours up Johnstone Strait. There is parking at the dock and it is free. There is no dock at the far end, so the last few metres are done in a rowboat; wear shoes you do not mind getting wet. **Do you need kayaking experience?** No. Guests paddle stable double and single sea kayaks with a guide ratio of one to five or better, and the guides run instruction before the first launch. The minimum age is generally ten, and children of fifteen or under need one accompanying adult each. **Will you see orca?** Nobody can promise a wild animal. What the camp gives you is position, directly beside the Robson Bight ecological reserve, the shoreline the northern resident orca return to, at the time of year they return to it. In three days I saw sea lions and one humpback and no orca, and still had one of the better weeks of my year. If the whales stay away, you have an excellent excuse to come back. **What should you pack?** Layers and a beanie. It can be genuinely cold and foggy out there even in August, and the mornings start misty more often than not. Everything else is provided. Kayaks, paddles, dry bags, tents and bedding are all there. There is power at the tents for charging. **What does a trip cost?** The four-day, three-night Orca Camp trip is $2,491.86 per person in the shoulder weeks and $2,797.86 on departures from 10 July to 30 August, plus GST, with a $600 single-occupancy fee on peak departures. That covers the water taxi, all kayaking and camping equipment, every meal, and guiding. ## The experience in this story - Wildcoast Adventures: https://wildernessledger.com/experience/wildcoast-adventures (plain text: https://wildernessledger.com/experience/wildcoast-adventures.md) Wildcoast Adventures: from $2,491.86 CAD per person for Orca Camp, 3 nights sharing a tent, early July and September 2026 ($2,797.86 from 8 July to 30 August), before 5% GST, and every Orca Camp departure from 1 July to 14 September is guaranteed to go whatever the numbers. Read from Wildcoast Adventures, Orca Camp (2026 dates and prices) on 14 September 2026. Written by Ben Taft, Photographer and filmmaker, The Wilderness Ledger (https://wildernessledger.com/about). Ben Taft stayed at the place this story describes and wrote it afterwards. Every photograph and film is his. Publisher: The Wilderness Ledger. Corrections: hello@wildernessledger.com.