Words Kelly Finerty
Photos Janis Jean
On this wharf, in its iconic blue-and-white humble structure, the Satellite Fish Company, or more colloquially the “Sidney Fish Market,” proudly perches as an iconic landmark.
This local mainstay feels like it has always been there. But the question is, will it remain?
Picture this: It’s 1958. Terry Fox was born, live television was broadcast across Canada for the first time, and John Christianson saw an opportunity in his wife’s hometown of Sidney – an abandoned shed at the Sidney Pier, where John founded the Satellite Fish Company. “The shed was built in 1927, and served several purposes over the years. John installed an ice maker and equipment for processing fish. He even had a live tank, which I remember from my visits with my father as a young boy,” current owner Ken Norbury (at right) remembers fondly.
After some successful years, the business was sold in 1964 to Don Norbury, one of John’s first employees and Ken Norbury’s uncle, who worked there for over 47 years. Don was no stranger to great customer service, delivering fresh seafood to his customers’ homes throughout Sidney and North Saanich in his Volkswagen van. “Originally, he did most of the work himself, closing the doors for a few hours while he made deliveries,” shares Ken.
Don sold the business in 2011 to his nephew Ken, an employee of the company since 1973, who also worked alongside current employee Kim Hayward at that time. “The late 1970s to about 1990 was a very busy time, with as many as six or seven workers. All four of Don’s children worked there at various times with a lot of our friends. It was a lot of hard work and long hours filleting up to 15,000 pounds of fish a week. We had a lot of fun working together,” Ken recalls. “We’ve had some famous people as customers, among them Prince Harry when he was living in North Saanich, and years ago Bob Hope, and more recently Will Millar of the Irish Rovers, and Gary Lockwood from 2001 A Space Odyssey.”
Ken and Kim are the company’s two remaining employees, continuing to collect, clean, sell and distribute fresh fish and seafood to local residents and visitors. Before the 1990s, the business mainly handled Pacific cod with quantities of sole, ling cod and rockfish. Ken shares that there was also a thriving salmon fishery with Chinook and sockeye salmon caught with gillnets, providing up to 10,000 pounds per week; however, like the rolling tides, the landscape of local fishing changed by the mid-80s as fish stocks were depleted by the fishing practices of the time. By 1995, Fisheries and Oceans Canada banned groundfish harvesting for six months and launched a new program severely limiting local fishing practices.
Ken shared that after 1996, Satellite Fish Company sourced most of its groundfish from Fisher Bay Seafood when it opened a processing facility on Bowerbank Road in Sidney. That plant unfortunately closed in 2008, with product now processed at Orca Seafood in Richmond and shipped to Satellite. “Our focus now is on the retail end and a few restaurant and grocery store customers,” relays Ken. “We have managed to survive despite the increased competition by adapting, and have actually flourished by keeping it small and simple. We are still open for business every day except Sundays and holidays.”
The future of Satellite Fish Company is, however, quite uncertain. “I was planning on retiring at 67, then 70, but it’s hard to pull the plug. Despite the downsizing of the business, in many ways it’s more challenging, especially with increased costs. Still, it will be difficult to walk away from a life’s work,” reflects Ken.
Having turned 71 this summer, Ken shared that he hopes to sell the business so it can continue to serve the community, but that sale all hinges on the Town of Sidney’s plans for the fate of the Beacon Wharf. According to the minutes from a November 21, 2021 Sidney town council meeting, the community adamantly wants to save the wharf and the Satellite Fish Company’s iconic blue landmark structure. A petition titled “Save our Sidney Fish Market” garnered 707 signatures, and the council unanimously carried a motion to maintain the Beacon Wharf “for as long as is practical” with a wharf condition assessment undertaken and completed in 2023 by McElhanney Ltd., a Western Canadian engineering firm. The report outlined that the wharf’s cost for repairs from 2023 to 2026 was to be $388,000, with another condition assessment due by the end of 2026. The firm assessed the “remaining service life of the wharf elements is likely to range between five and 10+ years, but continual repair and element replacement will be required to continue to extend the life of the wharf,” highlighting that the wharf can no longer accommodate vehicle loads or moored boats. “My current lease expires at the end of this year, and I have not heard from anyone at Town Hall about renewing it or what plans may be in the works,” says Ken.
Perhaps it’s true that not all good things last. The West Pier in the United Kingdom (1800s-1965) was a holiday destination for European families for over 100 years, demolished in 2010 after falling into disrepair in 1975. A better historical news story may be the original Notre-Dame in Paris, which suffered a devastating fire in 2019, but was fully restored to its original beauty in 2024 by donations amounting to approximately €1 billion. So, will Beacon Wharf and its iconic blue landmark follow the same fate as the U.K.’s West Pier, or be fully restored like the Notre-Dame? Hopefully, the Satellite Fish Company and its loyal community will know before 2026 comes to an end.
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