Marine traffic from Victoria, BC: Coast Guard radio, sectors and AIS

Off the mouth of Nanaimo's harbour, a line runs on paper from the light on Entrance Island to Five Fingers Island. The Canadian Coast Guard numbers it calling-in point 23, and a ship that crosses it is expected to tell Victoria Traffic. Nothing marks the line on the water. It exists in a table in the 2026 edition of Radio Aids to Marine Navigation, the annual Coast Guard publication that sets out who listens to which channel along the coast of British Columbia.

The table belongs to a system that most people on shore never hear. Freighters heading for Nanaimo's port, tugs with barges, and ferries all move through waters divided into sectors, each with its own VHF frequency and its own officers watching radar and transponder signals. Recreational boaters share the same water and much of the same radio spectrum, even when they are not the ones being tracked.

Two centres for the waters around Vancouver Island

The Coast Guard runs 12 Marine Communications and Traffic Services (MCTS) centres across Canada. Its program page lists four jobs for them: safety radio communication through a network of shore radio sites, vessel traffic services, information that supports marine activity, and screening of vessels entering Canadian waters. Two of those centres cover the waters around Vancouver Island.

MCTS Victoria, call sign VAK, works from Patricia Bay, according to the Radio Aids publication, and lists its hours as H24, meaning around the clock. Services are in English only. The centre does not broadcast from Patricia Bay alone. The Coast Guard describes it as operating remote-controlled sites across Vancouver Island and the southwest coast of the province, and the facilities tables name them: Mount Newton and Mount Helmcken near Victoria, Mount Parke, Gabriola Island, Bowen Island, Cape Lazo, Texada Island, Discovery Mountain, Seymour Narrows, Telegraph Cove and Port Hardy, among others.

MCTS Prince Rupert, call sign VAJ, sits at the other end of the province but reaches back down the island's outer coast. Its remote sites include Port Alberni, Estevan Point, Nootka, Esperanza, Holberg, Mount Ozzard and Eliza Dome, and it also runs offshore traffic functions, including clearances for vessels arriving in Canadian waters from the west. Both centres keep watch on VHF channel 16 at nearly every site. Several sites add channel 70 for digital selective calling, the button-press distress alert that modern marine radios can send.

The Gabriola Island site, a short distance across the water from Nanaimo, is listed with channels 11, 16 and 83A. The facilities table carries one plain note about it: channel 83A is not monitored 24 hours a day.

Traffic sectors and their VHF channels

Vessel traffic services in the Western Region are organised into two zones, Victoria and Prince Rupert, which the Coast Guard splits into sectors. The 2026 publication gives each sector a working channel, and it is the one place on this page where a list carries real data.

The boundaries themselves are written as strings of coordinates and light positions. Sector 1 of the Victoria zone, for example, follows the international boundary through Haro Strait and Boundary Passage, then cuts across to Roberts Bank, Sandheads and the Iona breakwater before following the shore to a line joining Reception Point, Merry Island, Ballenas Island and Cottam Point. North of that line the channel changes to 71. If you run a boat from Nanaimo up toward Comox, that line off Nanoose is where the working channel of the traffic you hear on the radio changes, in the same stretch of water where the Whiskey Golf test range adds its own radio control.

This is a summary, not a navigation reference. Channels and boundaries are revised, and the Coast Guard says a Notice to Mariners is issued whenever facilities change. Anyone planning a passage should read the current Radio Aids to Marine Navigation in full.

The shared system in Juan de Fuca Strait

The southern end of the island is the one place where two countries share the job. In 1979, by formal agreement, the Canadian Coast Guard and the United States Coast Guard set up the Co-operative Vessel Traffic Services for the Strait of Juan de Fuca region, with the stated aim of moving traffic safely while reducing the risk of pollution. Participation is mandatory in both countries' territorial waters.

Three centres divide the area. Prince Rupert Traffic handles the western approaches on channel 74, and inbound ships check in with it at 48 degrees north or 125 degrees 15 minutes west before entering the traffic separation scheme. Seattle Traffic, run by the U.S. Coast Guard from its Puget Sound centre, takes Juan de Fuca Strait itself on channel 05A. Victoria Traffic takes over north and east of a line from Church Point to Race Rocks light and on to Hein Bank, covering Haro Strait, Boundary Passage and the southern Strait of Georgia on channel 11.

For a ship bound for Vancouver, that means three different centres on a single approach. For anyone watching the water off Victoria's waterfront, it explains why a freighter that has just passed Race Rocks is talking to a Canadian centre after a stretch with an American one.

Who has to report, and who only listens

The reporting rules in Part 3 of the publication, which cites the Vessel Traffic Services Zone Regulations, apply first to vessels of 300 gross tonnage or more, to vessels towing or pushing a combined 500 gross tonnage or more, and to vessels carrying pollutants or dangerous goods. A second set of reports applies to vessels 20 metres or longer, with exclusions for pleasure craft under 30 metres and for fishing vessels under 24 metres and not more than 150 gross tonnage. The same part says a continuous listening watch shall be maintained on the appropriate sector frequency.

For small boats the more familiar rules are in Part 4. Channel 16 and 2182 kHz are to be used only for distress, urgency and safety traffic and for calling. MCTS centres do not monitor working frequencies, so a first call has to go on the calling channel. The Coast Guard and Transport Canada encourage small vessels to carry VHF radios with digital selective calling, which must be programmed with the boat's Maritime Mobile Service Identity number. Licensing and MMSI numbers are handled by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada.

There is also a phone route, with a caveat. In an emergency only, boaters can dial *16 on a cellphone to reach an MCTS centre where the service exists, though the publication warns that a cellphone is not a good substitute for a marine radio. Search and rescue itself is coordinated by the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre Victoria, which lists 1-800-567-5111 and #727 on a cellphone.

Seeing the traffic for yourself

MCTS officers track ships with VHF radio, surveillance radar in busy areas, the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and a traffic management system called INNAV. AIS is the part the public can see. The U.S. Coast Guard's Navigation Center describes it as a shipboard broadcast system that works like a transponder on the VHF marine band, sending a vessel's name, call sign, course, speed and MMSI, with positions as accurate as the ship's GPS.

Anyone with an AIS receiver, or a chartplotter that decodes AIS, can see transmitting vessels nearby. Public websites and apps also plot AIS positions on maps of marine traffic around Victoria, BC and the rest of the coast. None of these is the Coast Guard's own picture, and the regulations explain the gaps.

Under section 118 of the Navigation Safety Regulations, 2020, AIS Class A is required on vessels 20 metres or longer other than pleasure craft, on vessels carrying more than 50 passengers, on vessels carrying dangerous goods or bulk pollutants, on dredges that could be a collision hazard and on towboats 8 metres or longer. A passenger vessel, or a vessel 8 metres or longer carrying a passenger, on a voyage beyond sheltered waters needs Class A or Class B. Most private sailboats and runabouts fall outside both lists. The rule that AIS stay switched on for the whole voyage also does not apply to government vessels that are not operated commercially. A quiet stretch on a tracking map can still hold kayaks, sport boats and naval vessels.

Who watches the rest of the coast

Traffic services are about safety. Security sits elsewhere, in Marine Security Operations Centres that grew out of Canada's 2004 National Security Policy. Transport Canada describes them as joint centres where National Defence, the RCMP, the Canadian Coast Guard, the Canada Border Services Agency and Transport Canada share intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information within their own legal mandates. The West Coast centre is in Victoria.

Their stated task is maritime domain awareness, which Transport Canada defines as identifying and reporting on activity at sea that could threaten Canada's sovereignty, security or safety. The public page gives no figures for incidents, and nothing in the sources consulted for this article describes piracy in British Columbia waters, so no such claim is made here. Commercial shipping to Nanaimo, whether to the downtown harbour or to the Duke Point deep-sea terminal run by the Nanaimo Port Authority, moves inside both systems at once: reported to the traffic centre, visible on AIS, and within reach of the security centre's data.

A race through every sector

Every second year, a fleet of keelboats tests this whole arrangement from the other side. The Van Isle 360 International Yacht Race starts and finishes in Nanaimo, where the Port of Nanaimo hosts the fleet at the visiting vessel pier and volunteers carry out courtesy safety inspections before the start. Results on the race site begin in 1999, run yearly to 2001, and then continue in odd-numbered years.

The host communities list traces the course: Nanaimo, Comox, Campbell River, Sayward and Port Neville, Telegraph Cove, Port Hardy, Winter Harbour, Ucluelet and Victoria's Inner Harbour. Set against the Radio Aids boundaries, the fleet leaves Victoria Sector 1, works north through Sector 4 and its channel 71, rounds the top of the island near the Prince Rupert North limits at Cape Scott, and runs down the outer coast in Prince Rupert South on channel 74. From 2023 the organisers moved the leg 3 finish to the Kelsey Bay pier at Sayward, and the organisers describe the Winter Harbour to Ucluelet run, about 138 nautical miles, as the longest leg.

The race site says the Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue station at Ucluelet has met the fleet there since the first race in 1999 and escorts boats into the small craft harbour, where the shoals at the entrance can turn rough in a blow. The 2027 edition, listed for June 5 to 19 and billed as the 15th, has new organisers, Chris and Christa Maier of Black Wolf Racing, and a preliminary schedule that mentions a possible 10 a.m. start in Port Hardy. The rest of that schedule was posted as an image, and its details were not readable when this was written.