Fuca Strait

The Strait of Juan de Fuca opens between Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula, connecting the Pacific with the sheltered inland waters of the Salish Sea. Long known to the Indigenous peoples of its shores, the passage receives ocean winds and waves at its western entrance, while strong currents run around the islands and rocks farther east.

In 1787 the fur trader Charles Barkley identified the entrance with a passage described by Juan de Fuca, a Greek pilot who claimed to have sailed here in 1592. Barkley's name for the strait recalled the old hope of a waterway across North America. Spanish expeditions led by Manuel Quimper and Francisco de Eliza explored the passage and its neighboring waters in the following years.