Depoe Bay has an appeal, but so much of its natural beauty is obscured from the highway by gift shops or intruded upon by traffic that you’ve got to know where to look. In his book Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon wrote “Depoe Bay used to be a picturesque fishing village; now it was just picturesque.” While it’s true that most of the commercial fishing is long gone, you can still park your car along the highway and walk out on the bridge to watch sportfishing boats move through the narrow channel to what the Guinness Book of World Records rates as the world’s smallest navigable harbor. South of the bridge is another record-setter, the Oregon coast’s largest secondhand bookstore, the Channel Bookstore (541/765-2352).
The Sea Hag restaurant (541/765-2734), on US-101 in downtown Depoe Bay, is a time-tested seafood place, as is Whale Cove Inn (541/765-2255), two miles south of town overlooking a picturesque inlet formerly used by bootleggers during Prohibition.
