Blubber Bay is a community and an embayment on the northern tip of Texada Island, between the Strait of Georgia to the west and Malaspina Strait to the east, and the site of a historical shore whaling station and present-day limestone mine, about 76 miles (122 km) northwest of Vancouver and 5 miles (8 km) southwest of Powell River, British Columbia. The bay was named on British Admiralty charts from 1874 presumably for the try pots used for rendering blubber that were left on the beach by whalers. Texada Island lies at the eastern edge of both the Wrangellia terrane and the Insular physiographic belt. The island is mostly massive limestone of the Marble Bay Formation underlain by volcanic rocks of the Texada Formation. The Texada Formation developed during the Middle to Late Triassic and consists of pillowed and massive basaltic flows with thick units of pillowed breccias. The Marble Bay Formation formed during the Late Triassic and consists of a limestone sequence 200 to 1700 feet (60-520 m) thick that occurs in a belt 1.9 miles (3 km) wide and 11 miles (18 km) long.
The northern part of Texada Island is the traditional territory of the Tla’amin, or Sliammon, First Nation who are a part of the greater Northern Coast Salish peoples and had a summer village on the shore of Blubber Bay called Tah-lahk-nahtch. Their main winter village was at present-day Grace Harbour in Theodosia Arm. In the 1800s, whalers from New England, California, and the Hawaiian Islands hunted in the North Pacific and Arctic in sailing ships and the Strait of Georgia became a popular winter rendezvous where historically, about 100 to 150 humpback whales remained until at least January. In 1866, a shore whaling station was established at Blubber Bay so that carcasses could be towed to shore where the blubber was sliced off the animals and rendered into oil. At least 95 humpback whales were taken from the Strait of Georgia and Queen Charlotte Strait from 1866 to 1873. In 1905, the Pacific Whaling Company began operating two summer whaling stations on the west coast of Vancouver Island using steam-powered ships and exploding harpoon heads. They wanted to extend their season by whaling the protected waters of the Strait of Georgia during winter, and in 1907, began operating a whaling station near Nanaimo. Whaling in the strait was a small part of the overall whaling industry in British Columbia, which took over 5,700 humpback whales along the coast from 1905 to the end of whaling in 1965.
The discovery of magnetite at the northern part of Texada Island in 1873 marked the beginning of a long history of mining activity. A small village named Blubber Bay was established to support the mining operation that between 1896 and 1976 produced 3.3 tonnes of gold and 39.6 tonnes of silver. The mines also produced 10 million tonnes of magnetite iron ore and 35,898 tonnes of copper, and there is a massive supply of pure limestone suitable for the manufacture of lime and cement. Today, the largest limestone production center in British Columbia is on Texada Island where quarries at Gillies Bay and Blubber Bay ship 5 to 6 million tonnes annually. Both operations currently have excess capacity and are aggressively marketing locally and internationally. The Blubber Bay quarry is currently operated by CRH plc, an international group of diversified building materials businesses headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. The limestone is used to make a variety of cement such as Portland, fly ash, masonry, oil wells, and soil stabilizers. Read more here and here. Explore more of Blubber Bay and Texada Island here:
