A floating lodge is a strange thing to photograph. There is no ground. The building moves, not much, but enough that a tripod is a suggestion rather than a tool, and every line you would normally use to square a frame is quietly, continuously wrong.
Nootka Sound Resort sits in Galiano Bay on the west coast of Vancouver Island, one of three properties Nootka Marine Adventures runs out here, and it is tied to the shore rather than standing on it.
Everything here floats. The building you sleep in is moored to the shore rather than built on it, and by the second morning you stop noticing.
The sheltered-water argument
Nootka Sound is a big protected inlet system behind the outer coast, and that geography is the whole commercial case for this place. When the swell is up and the open Pacific is unfishable, which on this coast is a normal number of days a season rather than an unlucky one, the water inside the sound is still working.
That is worth more than it sounds when you have flown across a continent for three days of fishing.
If you would rather work it out yourself, rental boats from eighteen to twenty-four feet are available, and the bring-your-own-boat package costs roughly half and includes moorage. There are kayaks and paddleboards for the days nobody wants to fish, which is a more common day than most fishing lodges admit to in their brochures.
There is no other way in
Guests arrive by floatplane onto the dock, in their own boat, or by guide-boat transfer from Moutcha Bay, which is itself about two hours by road from Campbell River. No road reaches this building, and none ever will.
The practical effect is that the fleet sleeps alongside the people who will take it out. Boats are tied to the same structure as the beds, fuelled and rigged where they float, and nothing has to be trailered anywhere at half past five in the morning.
What the package actually buys
This is sold as a fixed package rather than a nightly rate, and the list is longer than most: a private suite with an ensuite for two, hot breakfast, a boxed lunch, appetisers with beer and wine, a three-course dinner, a twenty-four-hour snack bar, daily housekeeping, and fish processing to provincial standard, filleted, vacuum-packed, flash-frozen and boxed for the flight home.
The best thing I can tell you about the place is that the covered deck is where people end up, that it is built out over the water, and that nobody goes inside until it gets cold.
There is a virtual tour of the resort, worth ten minutes if you have never seen a floating lodge and are trying to picture it. The Nootka Sound Resort listing has the packages, the season and a way to ask what is open.
