Camping at French Beach Provicial Park & Exploring Sooke

French Beach Provincial Park has one of the two front-country, drive-in campgrounds along the stretch of southwestern Vancouver Island between Sooke and Port Renfrew (the other one being China Beach in Juana Fuca Provincial Park). It’s only about 20 minutes west of Sooke by car, so it’s a very convenient base from which to explore the lovely town.

French Beach Provincial Park

The campground offers basic amenities: pit toilets, water taps, and garbage bins. The sites are spacious and offer great privacy due to thick undergrowth. In face, our site (#56) was so well covered by bushes, we wouldn’t have been able to tie up clothes lines or rig up tarps.

The campground offers easy access to a lovely day use area with a grassy field, a playground, and picnic tables along French Beach. Some campsites are within 300 m of the beach, and the connecting trail is of gentle grade and flat, making water access a breeze.

The beach is a mix of sand and rock, and the waves were rolling but gentle during our summer visit. It looks very fun to paddle on for an intermediate ocean paddler.

I enjoyed a peaceful morning jog before the fam woke up.

And then I brought the fam to share the stoke.

After we packed up on the last day, we came back one more time and rode our bikes on the beach.

Exploring Sooke

Sooke Rotary Pier

Besides spending time on the beach, we headed to Sooke every day during our stay. One of the main reasons was to go crabbing from the Rotary Pier.

Access is down several flights of stairs at the end of Murray Road where there’s a small public parking lot. There’s also a short boardwalk attached to the fishing pier for a stroll while we wait for the traps to soak.

People were getting both dungeonness and red rock crabs, but most are either female or undersized. We had only one legal red rock out of soaking two traps for more than 24 hours, so it wasn’t the most productive. But we had some nice chats with other crabbers here.

Sooke Region Museum and Night Market

We paid 2 visits to the Sooke Region Museum and Visitor Centre. First visit was the museum itself, featuring dioramas, an old film about All Sooke Days, artifacts and souvenirs.

On our second visit, we enjoyed a much livelier crowd at the Sooke Night Market. With food, produce, and artisan products, the whole place was filled with family-friendly energy.

They even opened the lighthouse for visitors to climb up for a look around, and stationed a retired coast guard to share his stories with the visitors.

Sooke Potholes

Sooke Potholes are a series of swimming holes along Sooke River. Somewhat confusingly, there is a Sooke Potholes Provincial Park and a Sooke Potholes Regional Park. The provincial park is immediately south of the regional park, and looks simply like a parking lot as you drive up from the south.

Parking is free in the provincial park, but the paid regional park lots are closer to where the swimming holes are. The regional park also contains a sizeable, fcfs campground which operates from mid May to mid September.

We were a little tired by the time we made our way to the potholes, so we only visited Parking Lot 1. We’ve been told that Lot 2 and 3 were even more spectacular.

Sooke Harbour House and Whiffin Spit

We had lunch at Sooke Harbour House. We felt a little out of place with our 3 kids who were high on camping energy (read: feral and unkempt), dining at a higher-end boutique hotel.

After lunch, we went for a quick walk on the Whiffin Spit, which is nice and flat. In fact, it was too flat and predictable, that we never bother finish walking the whole path since you can basically see the whole thing from the parking lot.

SEAPARC Pool and Bike Park

Another really cool attraction in Sooke was the SEAPARC Rec Centre and the nearby Bike Park. We came here to swim and shower. Having some swimming pool fun and taking a hot shower is one of our favorite ways to break up a long camping trip.

The bike park was also top-notch. There were kid-friendly pump tracks and graded BMX dirt tracks, both well maintained and signed.

Overall, a 2-night stay at French Beach Campground gave us just enough time to have a glimpse of what the area offers. A 4-night stay would be more sufficient to enjoy a whole day at French Beach, and another day to explore the other beaches along this beautiful coast.