Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco is one of the worst tourist monstrosities of all time. The world famous Fisherman’s Wharf manages to pull off the difficult task of combing garish rip-off tourist trinkets and outrageous prices at really bad supposedly “high-end” restaurants in a setting seedier than many big city bus depots.

So anytime you hear about another Fisherman’s Wharf in a tourist city, there’s bound to be a little trepidation.

Fear not when you’re told about Fisherman’s Wharf in Victoria, Vancouver Island’s largest and most hip city, though. For the Fisherman’s Wharf in Victoria is a pure charming pleasure.

You’ll actually find real fisherman at it for one thing, sometimes selling fresh seafood right out of a shop next to where their boat is docked. It’s a small cheery place too with house boats bopping along its pier in all shapes, sizes and colors. (I seriously half considering putting down a deposit on a little green house boat cottage, until I remembered how little my charmless Castle Baron boss pays me - and how I can often barely maintain my balance swinging a golf club let alone floating in water all the time).

At Victoria’s Fisherman’s Wharf, you don’t have to buy a floating house to feed the harbor seals though.

In fact, here the seals are practically like your neighbor dogs anywhere else. They swim right up to the edge of the skinny pier and jump out even farther than that when they see a tourist with a bucket of dead fish (only a $1 for a whole bucket at the fish shop). Not many people seem to know about this either, so when one in the know person gets his fish bucket, you’ll soon have a steady run of parents with kids getting buckets.

Here’s a YouTube video of some tourist feeding the seals. It’s much more interesting than this person makes it out to be (this videographer is in desperate need of a music mood lesson from WorldGolf.com’s own video guru BTuck), but at least it gives you the basic idea.

And feeding the seals is just part of what makes it cool to walk around a Fisherman’s Wharf that’s actually a fishermen’s wharf.

Somebody from San Francisco needs to visit British Columbia and see how authentic is done.