The first of the old steamship landings north-east of the Town boundary, in Electoral Area F, with a wharf kept up by the people who use it.
Where Granthams Landing sits, and the other places we attend
around Gibsons. Every name on the map is a link.
Outside the Town, in Electoral Area F
Granthams Landing is the first of the old Howe Sound steamship landings north-east of Gibsons, on the shore road between the municipal boundary and Soames Point. BC Geographical Names records it as a community, official, with a decision date of 31 December 1982. Houses sit below a two-lane road and up the bank behind it.
The boundary decides everything else here. Granthams is in Sunshine Coast Regional District Electoral Area F, West Howe Sound, not in the Town of Gibsons. Area F has 2,407 residents and 1,111 occupied private dwellings, and its population grew 17.8 per cent between the 2016 and 2021 censuses, the fastest growth anywhere in the regional district. Roads here are provincial rather than municipal, and there is no town bylaw department to call.
Seventy-eight connections against about a hundred and sixty households
The regional district's Granthams water system has 78 active water connections. Its local source was the Granthams Well, drawing on Aquifer 560. Two storage tanks of 227,000 litres each are shared with Soames, and the pair of systems produced 70 million litres in 2021, both running below their designed capacity.
The Granthams Wharf Association, which looks after the community wharf, counted membership at nearly 40 per cent of about 160 community members in late 2017. Set that against 78 connections and a large part of Granthams is not on the regional district's pipe at all. The remainder draw from private drilled wells with electric pumps, which stop when the power line comes down.
The old Granthams Landing well is an artesian flowing well producing about 1 litre per second, and it is to be decommissioned. Its replacement is the Church Road wellfield, where two wells yield 54.4 litres per second between them, with a treatment plant proposed beside the existing Granthams Landing reservoir.
Since 2023 the taps here follow Chapman
The regional district stated that in 2023 the Granthams and Soames systems would be incorporated into the Chapman water system to give redundancy of supply for maintenance and emergencies. Granthams therefore follows Chapman's stage restrictions. Stage 4, a total ban on outdoor use, was declared on 10 August 2021, 31 August 2022 and 8 September 2023. The 2026 season ran at Stage 2 from 5 June and dropped back to Stage 1 on 9 September 2026.
Four kilometres up the same shore, Langdale draws on a different aquifer and is not on Chapman at all. Hopkins Landing, in between, is on neither and runs its own improvement district. Three neighbouring communities on one stretch of coast have three separate water authorities.
An Aquifer 560 Watershed Agreement was signed on 30 August 2023 by three governments, covering the recharge area on the mountain, four creeks and the harbour.
The wharf is maintained by the people who tie up to it
The Granthams Wharf Association is a volunteer body. It does not own the wharf outright; community members maintain and operate the floats, a boat rack and a dinghy dock, and work parties do the seasonal jobs of winterising the floats, fitting spacer boards between them and scraping mussels.
A storm in January 2018 drove logs against the structure and caused significant damage, and the community organised to repair it. There is no harbour authority standing behind that work. If the owner of a boat on those floats lives in Vancouver, nobody is checking its lines in December.
The whole shore goes out on one storm
In the snowstorm of 4 March 2024 Granthams was named in the outage list with Port Mellon, Langdale, Hopkins Landing, Elphinstone and Upper Gibsons, with over 3,000 customers off at 8:30 that morning. The windstorms of 4 November 2022 and 4 November 2024 struck this shore the same way.
Granthams Landing sits inside the West Howe Sound Fire Protection District, served from the main hall at 790 North Road. Granthams does not appear by name in the only community-by-community crime table the RCMP has published, for the fourth quarter of 2023, in which neighbouring Soames Point recorded one call for service.
What a check at Granthams Landing covers
The float, the ramp, the dinghy dock and the boat rack, and mooring lines after a blow
Bank stairs and handrails between the road and the house, which take the weather first
The regional district water connection and its shut-off, or the well pump house and pressure tank
Heat running at its setting, or the lines drained and the main valve shut
Kitchen and bathroom supply lines, the hot-water tank, and the floor under each
Trees leaning on the roof or over the service drop after a southeast wind
The driveway and any culvert on it, after heavy rain on a steep bank
Mail, parcels and anything left visible on a deck facing the road
A dated, photographed record of everything above, delivered by email
Most household policies treat an unoccupied house as covered only if a competent person inspects it at fixed intervals through the heating season, in many wordings not more than four consecutive days apart, or if the water is off and the lines are drained. Every insurer words this differently, so read your own policy before deciding what interval you need.
What it costs
A scheduled check at Granthams Landing is
$55 a visit, plus
$10 travel. The travel charge is the same
everywhere between Gibsons and Egmont. There is no minimum term and no joining fee.
See the full price list.
Where these facts come from
Every figure, date and quotation on this page was taken from one of these. They are
listed so you can read them yourself.
