It’s difficult to talk about beauty without simplifying or over-romanticizing. There can be beauty in ugliness, a certain sad, ironic beauty of human endeavour represented, say, by a wheelless splay-forked bicycle propped up in a brick-walled alley.

And then there’s the beauty of leaning back on a sun-warmed beach on a small island watching eagles dive for fish against a backdrop of mountains. Of rain on the roof of a well-made tent. Of a handmade sweater. A man dancing lightly across a log boom. West Coast beauty. Of course, you don’t need a guidebook to tell you where to find natural splendour in coastal British Columbia; you can just look around. But if you don’t want to arrive on Salt Spring Island for a day trip and discover that the only return ferry leaves just an hour after you got there; if you don’t want to drive up and down Galiano’s one main road and think “well, that was nice, but what do we do now?” (two things I have, however stupidly, done), a guidebook is a good idea.

Southern Gulf Islands of British Columbia is a lively, full-colour guide aimed at visitors “travelling on land by their own transport.” The authors, two couples who live on Pender Island, rightly acknowledge that other guidebooks already do a good job with island cycling, hiking, yachting, diving, and paddling.

Introductory chapters cover general information – including warnings that ferries don’t run like buses – natural and human history, and “island life.” Islands get a chapter each with colour-coded headers for easy dipping. Sidebars abound in this attractively designed book, highlighting how to get there, recreational opportunities, island services (including selective lists of accommodations and places to eat), and events. Other sidebars feature the petroglyphs on Salt Spring and Gabriola, island businesses like Pot of Gold (a coffee-roasting operation on Thetis), and settlers like Sylvia Stark, one of a number of African-American former slaves who homesteaded on Salt Spring in the 1860s. The main text, meanwhile, is a many-legged guided tour of each island, with stops at marinas, cemeteries, lighthouses, artists’ studios, and spectacular natural features like Malaspina Galleries, a 70-metre long sandstone sea cave on Gabriola.

Convert that I am to travel guides, they remain inessential next to paddling guides. Being stranded on a Gulf Island with a car and money is nothing compared with being caught in a tidal rip or a showdown between kayak and freighter, and you don’t have to paddle far – only around the tip of Stanley Park from Vancouver’s English Bay – to get into this kind of trouble. A paddling guide tells you things a chart can’t – like where to find water (and whether it’s potable) and camping spots that aren’t on private property, or how far to stay away from seal haul-outs so you don’t spook the animals and jeopardize the survival of vulnerable pups.

Mary Ann Snowden’s newly expanded and updated Island Paddling gives a water-level view of the Gulf Islands and Barkley Sound, profiling 36 trips varying in duration from one to seven days. Her information on paddling and camping safety and etiquette is thorough without claiming to be exhaustive. (Throughout, Snowden encourages paddlers to be respectful of native land and ecological reserves.)

Snowden tops each trip description with “highlights” and “considerations” (assessments of winds, currents, and required paddling expertise), so readers planning a trip can quickly find something to match their desires and abilities.

Detailed route descriptions follow, incorporating not only crucial navigational and landing information, but natural and cultural features of interest, both of which are plentiful. The Gulf Islands have been witness to some strange and shameful moments in Canada’s history. D’Arcy Island, a half-day’s paddle from Sidney, housed – poorly – a leper colony of Chinese immigrants from 1890 to 1924. Further up the coast, De Courcy Island was home to self-proclaimed guru Brother XII and his Aquarian sect in the 1930s before he fled to parts unknown amid allegations of fraud and sexual misconduct.

A short ferry ride across Howe Sound from Vancouver’s North Shore, the Sunshine Coast is a 160-kilometre stretch of coast so riven with inlets that it feels more island than the mainland it is. Halfway up, Jervis Inlet interrupts the winding coast highway with another ferry crossing, bisecting the area into Upper and Lower Coasts. Harbour Publishing’s Sunshine & Salt Air is an amicable and straightforward land-based guide to the area, divided in the same way. The coast lends itself to a linear approach, and the authors meander up it a couple of towns at a time, from Gibsons, where Molly’s Reach Café takes you back to all those years of Nick and Relic on The Beachcombers, through Sechelt, where the first self-governing native band in Canada is a strong cultural and social presence, and right up to Lund, a town originally settled by two Swedish brothers lured to Canada by a rumour that Canadians didn’t have to work in the rain. The kayaking sections of Sunshine & Salt Air are adapted from Paddling the Sunshine Coast, by Gibsons residents Dorothy and Bodhi Drope, who own and operate Sunshine Kayaking. They wrote the book primarily in response to a lack of one to cover their specific area, but also, having come to kayaking in their “middle years,” and having a penchant for poking around rather than strong-arming it, they wanted to offer a book not exclusively for “jocks.”

The result is a comprehensive guidebook with more personality than most. Each trip is accompanied by a hand-drawn map, and the authors’ drawings and photos dot the pages. There are even a couple of poems, and several well-placed anecdotes. A good portion of the excursions are day-trips, with enough selected longer expeditions to provide variety for the weekend or week-long paddler. While the authors don’t turn up their noses at staying at a bed and breakfast, they head into isolated areas and challenging waters with verve and enthusiasm.

The Dropes also contribute to the tantalizingly comprehensive new book, Kayak Routes of the Pacific Northwest. Edited by Peter McGee, a long-time kayak guide and founder of the B.C. Marine Trail Association, this book draws on a raft of expert paddlers and guides, who trace just about every kayak route along the in-the-works Cascadia Marine Trail, stretching from Puget Sound to the Alaskan border and taking in both sides of Vancouver Island. (Sea Kayaking Canada’s West Coast by John Ince and Heidi Kottner came close to this, but has not to my knowledge been revised since 1982.) Of course, one book can’t cover every inch of sea and shore, as the editor acknowledges: “We never intended to put out a book that would take away your sense of discovery, and several sites were left out as little gifts for the more adventuresome paddler to stumble upon.” McGee puts together the most thorough introduction to sea kayaking that I’ve seen in a guidebook. (The “useful contacts” section at the back of the book is equally definitive.) Sections on minimum impact camping, human waste disposal, and coastal wind patterns all go one or two or three steps further than similar sections in the other books reviewed here. And while admonitions to ask for permission to land on First Nations reserve land are de rigeur in all these guides, this is the only one to note that hundreds of non-reserve sites along the coast have archeological, historical, and current significance to First Nations peoples, and require the same respect of paddlers as reserve land.

Kayak Routes takes you from ultra-urban paddles on Seattle waterfront or Vancouver’s False Creek to the wilds of Vancouver Island’s northwest coast and Checleset Bay Ecological Reserve where, if you’re lucky, you might bob a respectful distance from a sea otter, a wary mammal that was virtually eliminated from West Coast waters during the fur trade, and is now making slow recovery after reintroduction.

Room doesn’t permit the guide to be as detailed as Island Paddling or Paddling the Sunshine Coast. Small-scale maps provide visual reference for the area profiled in each chapter, followed by brief “background,” “getting there,” “weather and hazards,” and “special considerations” sections. Trip descriptions generally stick to essentials of wind and current hazards, availability of camping spots and fresh water, proximity of bears, and other practical considerations. But it is the West Coast, after all, and contributors can’t help waxing eloquent about its wonders – pods of orcas in Johnstone Strait, sea caves and arches on the islands in Barkley Sound, majestic old growth forest in Clayoquot Sound, pounding surf on beaches, tranquil coves. And, as contributor Rupert Wong quotes a guiding friend on why she returns to Kyuquot Sound every year, it’s: “the bone-coloured nights when moonlight bathes the moss-covered trees, the sound of smacking as sea otters dine while nothing else is stirring.”