Charter market

SanJuanIslands

Over Four Hundred Islands and Four Ferry Landings

The San Juans lie in the Salish Sea between the Washington mainland and Vancouver Island, and the Bureau of Land Management counts over 450 islands, rocks and pinnacles in the group. Four take a car ferry: Lopez, Shaw, Orcas and San Juan. Everything else is a private boat, a floatplane, or nothing.

Nothing here is high except one hill. Mount Constitution on Orcas rises 2,407 feet directly from sea level, the second highest point on an oceanic island in the contiguous states, and its stone tower shows you a good part of the group at once. What it cannot show you is the shape of the thing, because you are standing on the largest piece of it.

What a Flight Puts Together

The archipelago as one object. Every island hides the rest behind trees and headlands. From two thousand feet the group resolves into a drowned range of forested ridge tops running northwest, water lying in the valleys between them.

The tide, drawn on the surface. Big water moves through narrow passes twice a day and writes itself as standing rips, slick lines and rings of foam that hold their place while it pours through. From a boat you feel it. From above it is a diagram.

The closed rocks. Bare islets and reefs with seals hauled out and seabirds packed on the ledges, a few acres each, all off limits at the waterline.

The monument headlands. The San Juan Islands National Monument covers roughly 1,000 acres of shoreline sites proclaimed in March 2013: Patos Island, Turn Point, Cattle Point, Point Colville, Watmough Bay. They are the corners of the group.

The Ferry Is the Terrain

There is no bridge and no causeway in the group, so the road stops at Anacortes and the boat is the road. Washington State Ferries runs it, and vehicle reservations are available and recommended, which is the planning problem in one line: the crossing is not blocked, it is booked.

Be fair about the other half. The same source notes that in almost all cases there is room for walk-on passengers, so a traveller on foot has an easy time of it. The trouble belongs to the itinerary with a car in it, or three islands, or a fixed hour to be somewhere. A missed connection behaves like any other hard stop in a schedule.

The Floatplane Gets There First

Scheduled and charter floatplanes already serve these islands well, landing on the harbours themselves rather than a field outside town. For a straight transfer from the mainland to a dock at Friday Harbor, the seaplane is hard to beat.

A helicopter answers a different question: three islands and a mainland stop in one afternoon, a party and its bags that will not fit a floatplane’s cabin, an origin with no scheduled service, or a trip whose subject is the archipelago rather than a destination inside it.

A Thousand Feet, Asked For Rather Than Ruled

These are working whale waters, so altitude comes up before anything else. NOAA Fisheries asks for a 1,000-foot minimum when viewing marine mammals from a manned aircraft, and warns that buzzing, hovering, landing and taking off near them is likely to harass the animals.

That is guidance rather than regulation, and the difference is worth knowing, because the strict distances you may have read about are vessel rules and say nothing about an aircraft. A careful operator holds the thousand feet anyway, and one who offers to drop below it for a better look is telling you how the flight will be run.

Eighty Rocks of Federal Wilderness

The small islands are not scenery, they are the San Juan Islands National Wildlife Refuge: 83 rocks, reefs and islands, closed to the public apart from parts of Matia and Turn, with a 200-yard buffer around them, and 80 of those 83 units, totalling 353 acres, designated the San Juan Wilderness in October 1976.

A wilderness of 353 acres in eighty pieces produces a simple rule: overfly at height, land nowhere in it. Between the refuge, the state parks and the monument sites, nearly every piece of level ground with a view of the water is spoken for.

Two Fields, No Tower, and a Border Overhead

Friday Harbor holds a single runway, 16/34, 3,402 by 75 feet of asphalt at a field elevation of 112.7 feet. It belongs to the Port of Friday Harbor, it is public-use and untowered, and the record asks that takeoffs be avoided between 2200 and 0700 for noise. Orcas Island Airport at Eastsound is smaller again, 16/34 at 2,901 by 60 feet, elevation 34.8 feet, also untowered, with deer on and around the runway in its remarks.

The border is closer than either. The 1846 treaty put the line in the middle of the channel, there turned out to be two channels, and an 1872 arbitration settled it through Haro Strait. The west and north shores face another country a few miles off, and it shows up in the record rather than the scenery: the FAA remarks for Orcas send a departing pilot to Victoria Terminal, in British Columbia, for clearance delivery. Settle early which side of that line a route sits on, and what class of machine is planned around it.

Two Records in the Whole County

The Washington page of the Heliport Atlas maps what the FAA record holds: 138 registered heliports statewide, not one open to the public, 64 of them hospital pads. San Juan County, which is the whole archipelago, holds exactly two, a medical clinic pad on Lopez and a private trust pad on Shaw.

So a landing happens at one of the two small fields or on ground that belongs to somebody, which makes who owns and manages the site the first question rather than the last. On islands where a helicopter is heard across three bays, it is a neighbour question too.

Typical Routes and Flight Times

The Seattle leg. The Puget Sound corporate fields north to Friday Harbor, seventy to ninety miles direct, against a drive to Anacortes and then a boat. This leg carries the market, and works the way any weekend getaway or airport transfer does.

The Bellingham leg. Thirty-odd miles across, over before the ferry loads.

The island circuit. Friday Harbor out over Stuart and Patos, east along Boundary Pass and Orcas, south over Lopez and back, flown as whole-aircraft scenic and sightseeing charter and planned against the light rather than the clock.

The interisland hop. Minutes between fields the boat turns into most of a day.

What Hiring the Whole Aircraft Changes

Your departure time is yours. No reservation window, no check-in cutoff, no standby lane. Against a ground alternative that is a timetable, that is most of the value.

You can take more than one island. A shared sightseeing seat flies one loop. A whole aircraft lands at two fields, holds while you walk a headland, and picks up the third on the way home.

You can wait a day. Holding the aircraft makes the schedule yours to move when the ceiling is on the water, part of the arithmetic in What a Charter Costs.

Seasonal Patterns

Summer is the settled season. The islands sit in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains and stay noticeably drier than the coast outside them, so July through September gives long light, calm water and the year’s most reliable flying. It is also when every sailing is full.

Autumn brings the fog, low cloud in the passes morning after morning, burning back by midday more often than not. A morning problem rather than a whole-day one.

Winter is wind and short days. Southeasterly gales come through in sequence, the flying between them is hard-edged and clear, and the daylight at this latitude shapes the itinerary.

Spring is unsettled and green, the prairies on San Juan Island turning, the weather changing hourly.

Which Charter Types Dominate Here

Transfers from the mainland, the largest share of the work and the one with the real argument.

Scenic flying, honest when sold as the shape of an archipelago rather than the promise of an animal.

Utility work. Photography and film year round, aerial survey of shoreline and forest, and property inspection where no road reaches.

Heliports near the San Juan Islands

The FAA records 30 heliports within 50 miles of the San Juan Islands in the current cycle. Not one is public use, so every landing here starts with the owner’s permission. Your operator makes that arrangement before the flight is confirmed.

Heliports only. Airports are a separate class of facility and are not counted here, and in many markets the charter itself works from one.

All Washington heliports Open the map here

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