Portrait of Carly Carey, Realtor®

Carly Carey

Realtor®

Text Me Now

A beautiful high end area inside of the RDN on Vancouver Island. 

Key takeaways

  • Five shore dive sites sit on the Nanoose peninsula, and all of them are beach entries. None require a boat.
  • Madrona Point is the best known, with four named walls running from roughly 60 feet to 90 feet.
  • Giant Pacific octopus and wolf eels hold established dens along the Madrona Point walls.
  • Visibility is best from late fall through early spring. Water is cold year-round and drysuits are standard.
  • There are no facilities at any of the sites. The nearest air fills are in Nanaimo and Parksville.

Nanoose Bay has more well-known shore diving than any other stretch of comparable coastline on eastern Vancouver Island. Five sites along the Nanoose peninsula are dived regularly, ranging from sheltered training bays to…

85 Views

Read Full Post

Key takeaways

  • Moorecroft Regional Park is the largest and most-visited: 35 hectares along a kilometre of shoreline.
  • Nanoose Hill, still widely called the Notch, is the peninsula's signature hike.
  • Enos Lake is known worldwide in evolutionary biology for a stickleback species pair that collapsed after invasive crayfish arrived.
  • Three waterfalls run on one creek at Shooting Star. They are seasonal and can dry up by midsummer.
  • Wall Beach is the best swimming beach. Most other Nanoose Bay shoreline is pebble and rock shelf.

Nanoose Bay has an unusual density of public green space for a community of roughly 6,540 people. Two regional parks, a string of community parks and beach accesses, a federal wildlife area, and several…

150 Views

Read Full Post

Key takeaways

  • Nanoose Bay is unincorporated. There is no municipal government, it is administered as Electoral Area E of the Regional District of Nanaimo.
  • Servicing is not uniform. Fairwinds has community water and sewer; much of the peninsula runs on private wells and septic.
  • The benchmark price was $929,500 in June 2026, roughly $113,000 above Nanaimo.
  • The nearest hospital is Nanaimo Regional General, about 30 minutes south.
  • A naval testing range has operated in Nanoose Harbour since the 1960s.

Nanoose Bay is one of the more desirable places to buy on eastern Vancouver Island, and it is also one of the more misunderstood. Buyers arriving from a city routinely underestimate what unincorporated living involves, and buyers…

63 Views

Read Full Post