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Whidbey Island is the largest of more than 600 islands that punctuate the Washington coastline. At 64 miles tip to tip, it’s also the longest island on the West Coast. Pleasing climate and relatively low annual rainfall first attracted the Northwest’s greatest concentration of Indians and later led to settlement of the island. While Seattle gets about 36 inches of rain a year, and more than 100 inches drench western portions of the Olympic Peninsula, south Whidbey Island gets only about 25 inches, and a mere 18 inches dampen the central and north island.
Oak Harbor is Whidbey’s largest city. From the mid-1800s until the early 1900s, this area was settled mainly by people of Irish and Dutch extraction. The same climate that attracted others also led the U.S. Navy to pick the Oak Harbor vicinity for a major air installation in 1942—the weather is good for flying. The explorer Captain George Vancouver named Whidbey Island after shipmaster Joseph Whidbey of HMS Discovery. Whidbey discovered Deception Pass and thereby proved this to be an island after all.
