Tuna
Sunday 31 March 2024
Another lovely sunny day. We headed south to Richmond (Steveston) and to the Britannia Shipyards National Historic Site. The shipyard building started out as a cannery. The rivers here were packed to the gills with salmon so it was a good spot for a cannery, along with the other 15 or so along the river. They employed a large number of Chinese and Japanese at the factory, and as treated them like second class citizens like the rest of the world.
However, over time the salmon population decline due to over fishing and an unfortunate blasting accident upriver which stopped an annual salmon run, that put most of the canneries out of business. They chose to convert the cannery into a shipyard around 1917 and other shipyard businesses took off many of which were owned by the local Japanese. However, in 1942 they ‘changed ownership’ as they interred all the Japanese at the start of WWII. All of these businesses and the housing were building on the swamp land so it must have been a rather unpleasant place to work and live. It all shut down around 1980 and is now a historic site.
We had plans to wander around here and thought it would take about 1.5-2 hours, we were done in 50mins and that was taking it slow. Unfortunately, this meant it was too early for lunch, we had planned on lunching at the local waterfront. But driving through that part of town at around 11.15am and it was already starting to swarm with people and parking was fast disappearing. We headed down the road a little way to what looked like a nice little park (Garry Point Park) that we could stop at and go for walk. It took us half an hour to drive through the carpark which was already full. We just wanted to get out of there, but it seemed like the other 50 cars were just hanging laps hoping to find a free park. As soon as we entered, we knew it was a bad idea, but couldn’t do a quick U-turn. This park was full of flowering cherry blossom trees and the local Japanese setting themselves up for a long afternoon. Apparently, 31 March is the end of the Japanese financial year and start of the cherry blossom season. The Japanese go all out and party hard.
Once we escaped the carpark, we drove a few kms away to find a park, regroup and decide what to do next. As it was now lunchtime, we chose to pick up a few supplies at the local supermarket and head home to have lunch on our balcony in the sun. Home was a 45 min drive away and the traffic had got much heavier that the morning. We did some more planning for where and what we want to do next and for the next 2.5 months of holidays.
