Deception Pass

In the spring of 1792 George Vancouver took the long island south of here for a peninsula of the mainland. On June 7 his sailing master, Joseph Whidbey, worked a small boat into what looked like a bay and found a narrow, violent channel cutting all the way through to Skagit Bay. Vancouver named the island for Whidbey and the channel Deception Passage, for having been deceived.

The pass is a tide race. Twice a day the water of Skagit Bay and Saratoga Passage drains through a gap of rock a few hundred feet wide, and the current can run at nine knots, with whirlpools and standing waves at the turn of the tide. The Samish and Swinomish summered here and had villages around the pass, and their name for it meant dangerous. At Rosario Beach on the Fidalgo side, a Samish story pole tells of the Maiden of Deception Pass, a young woman who married into the sea.

For most of a century Whidbey was reached only by boat. The bridge, two spans hopping across tiny Pass Island, was built in eleven months and dedicated at noon on July 31, 1935, with young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps working on its approaches and the park around it. It stands 180 feet over the water, and its walkways are the best place to watch the current run.