Depoe Bay: The World's Smallest Natural Harbor

The harbor you're approaching claims a world title: Depoe Bay bills itself as the world's smallest natural navigable harbor. Its original channel to the Pacific was only thirty feet wide, a tight rock-bound passage that fishing boats had to thread with care. The town takes its name from a Siletz Indian man known as Charley Depoe, born Ki-sa Che-wes-cla, who received this land as an allotment in eighteen ninety-four under the Dawes Act.

Congress authorized harbor improvements in nineteen thirty-seven, and by nineteen thirty-nine a proper inner basin had been carved out. A second expansion completed in nineteen fifty-two enlarged the harbor further, and the channel was widened in later decades to its current fifty feet. Today Depoe Bay is one of the central Oregon coast's busiest whale-watching ports, with gray whales passing close enough that spouts are visible from the highway bridge.