The Salt Spring and Mayne Island Lions Clubs teamed up for the second year to keep the Gulf Islands Santa Ship tradition alive.
Santa visited kids on Mayne and Saturna Islands on Sunday, Dec. 7 and then Salt Spring youngsters on Saturday, Dec. 13.
The first Santa Ship trip took place first just in Bellingham Bay, Washington in 1947 through a business group called the Bellingham Jaycees.
“In the beginning they just started running a small ship around Bellingham Bay,” Don Wight Jr. of the Bellingham Lions told Cherie Thiessen of Aqua magazine in 2019. “Then we started getting requests from many of the other islands and in the 1950s the Canadian Gulf Islands asked us if we could bring Santa up to see them too.”
Wight’s late father Don Wight Sr. had been the main initiator of the project in the 1940s.
In 1996 the Bellingham Lions took on the mission in cooperation with their Canadian counterparts.
The Covid pandemic and other challenges put an end to the cross-border Santa Ship after 2019, but Salt Spring and Mayne Island Lions Club members got together to revive the project last year.
Photos in the gallery below by Rob Lowrie.
