Imagine if you will a water-lovers paradise. There would have to be clean crisp white beaches with fine smooth sand, sailable waterways with room enough for all to spread out, no tide-affected river bars, no silting up of narrow entrances hampering larger-hulled vessels entry.
Imagine if you will a town on the same latitude as Brisbane but unaffected by cyclonic wind with a large harbour to sail around, opening not to the wild ocean but to a protected waterway with its own islands, beaches and places to explore. Where King George Whiting abound and even trawling a line behind you as you sail could lure one.
Imagine if you will a town steeped in history, remote, but pretty, rich in the generosity that defines Australian country towns, with some of the best sailing conditions available anywhere in Australia.
We arrived in Albany WA late one autumn evening. We had bought a yacht, sight unseen, and were heading across to the other side of the country to see her for the first time. My husband Peter arrived first by car, loaded up with all we were bringing from our former home. I flew across to Perth with our children and then drove down the lonely Albany highway in a hire car, arriving long after the sun had sunk below the horizon, exhausted after more than sixteen hours of travelling.
I could barely even make out the murky waters of the harbour in the inky shadows as I drove along, craning my neck to try and spot a marina in amongst the lanky gums along the water’s edge. I found a track and gingerly drove on, hoping that the headlights would show me where the track ended and the water began as the GPS repeatedly informed me that we had arrived at our destination.
The next day was a revelation. Driving the hire car back into town in the morning it was amazing to realise we had driven through the dark completely unaware of the vista we were now taking in.
The advertising calls it Amazing Albany and it seems, to the outsider such a cliché. But it is the truth. Albany is an amazing place. The sailors jewel of the west.
Sitting beside the Princess Royal Harbour, which itself sits snugly within King George Sound, Albany is a treasure in the vast open plains and rolling red hills of Western Australia.
There are two yacht clubs in Albany. One is located on the western rim of the harbour at Little Grove, at the aging Princess Royal Marina. It boasts being the first yacht club established in Western Australia and is kind of the old guard of local sailing. The Albany Yacht Club is newer and is not linked to a marina but welcomes any and all lovers of sailing, though many of its members are to be found at the recently completed floating marina built adjacent to the town itself, The Albany Waterfront Marina.
Our yacht was everything we hoped it would be and so much more. The risk we had taken in buying a yacht without being able to see it first had paid off. We were delighted with her and the one shortfall – that she was in a town so far away from home – was the source of our greatest joy. Albany we discovered, is a sailors paradise.
We had learned to sail on the beautiful Lake Macquarie north of Sydney. But each weekend as we learned how to hoist and lower the sails, to understand marine signage and the ‘rules’ of the waterway, we made our mistakes and learned amongst hundreds of other craft – powered and sail. It was a tricky place to learn! Like having your first driving lessons in the middle of Calcutta!
Contrast this to learning to sail our new yacht on the pristine and uncluttered waters of the Princess Royal Harbour and King George Sound.
Albany truly is blessed. Superlatives abound. And it is no cliché!
The Albany region was first home to the Menang Noongar people, who made use of the area during the summer months for fishing and other activities. They called the area Kinjarling which means "the place of rain".
The town we now know as Albany was first established in late 1826, when Major Edmund Lockyer, together with a contingent of convicts, soldiers, a surgeon and storekeeper, left Sydney aboard the Amity bound for King George III Sound. The Amity sailed into Princess Royal Harbour, one of the world’s largest natural harbours, on Christmas Day 1826. Earlier, successive explorers included George Vancouver, who entered and named King George III Sound and Princess Royal Harbour in 1791, but settlement did not occur until Lockyer’s arrival. Whalers and sealers working the Southern Ocean were also frequenting the area by the 1820s and on one of the quiet coves of King George Sound there remains a now-shut down whaling station, open daily for tours. Adjacent to the town itself, a replica of the brig Amity stands proudly on the shore line for visitors to explore.
Lockyer selected the site, making the pretty town the birthplace of West Australian settlement. He named his new town 'Frederickstown', after King George III's second son, His Royal Highness Prince Frederick Augustus, Duke of York and Albany – better known from the children’s nursery rhyme, The Grand Old Duke Of York! The name was changed to Albany 5 years later in 1831 when the settlement was transferred to the control of the Swan River Colony. Locals are happy to tell you that Albany should have been the capital of West Australia, but how happy they are that it is not! Famous Australian writer and poet Henry Lawson travelled to Albany in early 1890, where he worked and wrote for the Albany Observer newspaper. On his return to Sydney in September 1890, he wrote of his time in Albany, 'Albany will never change much - it is a pretty town, but vague. It seems to exist only in a somewhere-on-the-horizon sort of way; I like it all the better for that.'
We set out sailing for the day as the crystal clear waters of Princess Royal Harbour softly ripple in the breeze. We’ve packed a picnic lunch, planning to drop anchor and settle on the roomy deck and idle away the glorious day! The early peoples called Albany the place of rain and these days this whole coastline is known as the Rainbow Coast. Rain falls frequently but it is also true that rainbows abound! But none are present this day. We are heading out into King George Sound, through the well maintained Ataturk entrance – named following the contribution of that president of Turkey to the fledgling town.
We trawl a baited line and happily pull in some tuna, enough for dinner. Apart from us there is only one other yacht out and we have almost the whole harbour and Sound to ourselves.
The westerly wind pushes us towards Seal rock and to our delight some seals are visible. As we tack and turn towards Breaksea Island to the north of us, we are treated to the spectacular arrival of a mother whale and her calf. She’s teaching him to swim it seems, or simply trying to entertain us! There are several whale watching tours that go out once or twice daily in the whale watching season (June to October as the giant creatures migrate) as well as several charters that will take groups out – often the only other vessels out on the water.
King George Sound is a whale watchers haven with entire pods frolicking around on any given day. Sometimes they even venture into the more sheltered waters of Princess Royal Harbour, visible then even to shoppers strolling through the town!
The granite boulders that rise up majestically all around us from the clear waters of the Sound provide an incredibly picturesque backdrop for our sailing – how unlike anything we have ever seen on the East Coast!
We sail past Michaelmas Island and can see the great Southern Ocean beyond it. We have ventured out a few times, heading most recently towards Denmark with its beautiful beaches and protected coves to the west. When we leave the sheltered waters of King George Sound next we will be heading east and our first stop will be Two People’s Bay, where we will drop the anchor over-night. This is an easy day’s sail - a very pretty destination with excellent holding. Beyond that is Bremer Bay, another beautiful spot just 24 hours away with a picturesque harbour and excellent anchorages – our second over-night stop as we head towards the Bight. We realise that by the time we leave we will have barely scratched the surface as far as exploring this amazing place goes, but we must go when the weather pattern will be right for us to say our goodbyes to the friends we have made and begin our circumnavigation.
The Southern Ocean doesn’t scare us any more. We have learned so much while we prepared the yacht for the first part of our journey and prepared ourselves. We have spent hours talking to and learning from Mark McRae from Southern Ocean Sailing, our very favorite new friend.
We turn back then and head across the expanse of the Sound, watching all the while for more whales and drop our anchor in 3 or 4 meters of crystal clear water and watch it easily bed in the clean sand in a picturesque cove near Frenchmans Bay out past Vancouver Peninsular to enjoy our lunch. While we are getting things organised the children swim in the enticing water and debate putting the dinghy in so they can row the short distance to the shore where the sand of Goode Beach is so white it seems almost translucent.
We live on board the yacht and can sail whenever the wind is right and yet it is still a thrill to let off the mooring lines and feel the sense of freedom, of abandon that comes as the wind fills the sails and the boat glides and sashays through the water.
As we return after another delightful day sailing in the Sound, we pass Middleton beach, a very popular spot, boasting the whitest sand you will see anywhere. We pass the entrance to Oyster Harbour, barely visible until you are right upon it. It’s easy to miss but leads to a narrow but well-marked channel into another very protected harbour where you will find the home of Albany’s fishing fleet, a large swimming enclosure and the Emu Point Slipway. We spent a very busy week with our yacht on the hard here, the first time we had ever slipped a boat. Darren, the shipwright, was exceedingly helpful and after checking, fixing and anti-fouling we happily watched as our yacht was re-floated. The 40 ton hoist boat Lifter can deal with even the biggest boats, and sits adjacent to a large chandlery providing most resources boaters will need as well as one of our favourite places to eat in the town – the Squid Shack where local squid and oysters are cooked to perfection!
Back in through the entrance we sail past the port of Albany wharfs where there is a tanker tied up loading up its cargo. Cruise ships also make use of this wharf for a day every now and then as they make their way around the country, stopping in to Albany and giving a much appreciated boost to the local economy.
And so, one warm, sunny morning in October we untied our mooring lines for the last time and set off. Sad to say goodbye to a town that had welcomed us and made us feel so at home, yet excited too to be beginning such a life-changing journey.
We had learned while in Albany, of the incredible place the town holds in our Anzac history. This was where the ships gathered, where the soldiers boarded awaiting their departure en-mass for Gallipoli. King George Sound was, at the end, filled with ships, provisioning, preparing and waiting to leave. The shores of Albany, the town, the islands of King George Sound were the last sight many of them ever had of home.
The town will play a major role in the 2014 and 2015 Centenary commemorations. Plans are underway for a re-enactment of both the departure of the convoy and the first ever dawn service for it was here on April 25th 1923 that this was first held, where the Reverend Arthur White first proclaimed, ‘as the sun rises and goeth down, we will remember them’.
We knew none of this when we arrived, but soon acquainted ourselves with this amazing information and as well as taking in local historic sights, buildings and ships, we strolled sombrely through the Anzac Peace Park, reading the story of Albany’s unique place in Australia’s history.
On the morning that we left Albany we felt in a small way an affinity with those early courageous men and women. We were not heading to war or certain death but we left with a sense of their spirit in us too, that indomitable thing that abounds in our culture, that almost reckless spirit of adventure that took so many young men unwittingly to their deaths.
We were prepared, there was nothing reckless about our pushing out past the entrance to the inner harbour that day. We were off though, like them, not completely sure what we would encounter ahead, but carrying within us something we didn’t have before we had arrived in Albany – it had imparted something to us while we had readied ourselves and we are forever changed as a result. What a joy it will be to sail back in when we complete what we set out to - our slow meandering circumnavigation of Australia!
Imagine if you will a town on the same latitude as Brisbane but unaffected by cyclonic wind with a large harbour to sail around, opening not to the wild ocean but to a protected waterway with its own islands, beaches and places to explore. Where King George Whiting abound and even trawling a line behind you as you sail could lure one.
Imagine if you will a town steeped in history, remote, but pretty, rich in the generosity that defines Australian country towns, with some of the best sailing conditions available anywhere in Australia.
We arrived in Albany WA late one autumn evening. We had bought a yacht, sight unseen, and were heading across to the other side of the country to see her for the first time. My husband Peter arrived first by car, loaded up with all we were bringing from our former home. I flew across to Perth with our children and then drove down the lonely Albany highway in a hire car, arriving long after the sun had sunk below the horizon, exhausted after more than sixteen hours of travelling.
I could barely even make out the murky waters of the harbour in the inky shadows as I drove along, craning my neck to try and spot a marina in amongst the lanky gums along the water’s edge. I found a track and gingerly drove on, hoping that the headlights would show me where the track ended and the water began as the GPS repeatedly informed me that we had arrived at our destination.
The next day was a revelation. Driving the hire car back into town in the morning it was amazing to realise we had driven through the dark completely unaware of the vista we were now taking in.
The advertising calls it Amazing Albany and it seems, to the outsider such a cliché. But it is the truth. Albany is an amazing place. The sailors jewel of the west.
Sitting beside the Princess Royal Harbour, which itself sits snugly within King George Sound, Albany is a treasure in the vast open plains and rolling red hills of Western Australia.
There are two yacht clubs in Albany. One is located on the western rim of the harbour at Little Grove, at the aging Princess Royal Marina. It boasts being the first yacht club established in Western Australia and is kind of the old guard of local sailing. The Albany Yacht Club is newer and is not linked to a marina but welcomes any and all lovers of sailing, though many of its members are to be found at the recently completed floating marina built adjacent to the town itself, The Albany Waterfront Marina.
Our yacht was everything we hoped it would be and so much more. The risk we had taken in buying a yacht without being able to see it first had paid off. We were delighted with her and the one shortfall – that she was in a town so far away from home – was the source of our greatest joy. Albany we discovered, is a sailors paradise.
We had learned to sail on the beautiful Lake Macquarie north of Sydney. But each weekend as we learned how to hoist and lower the sails, to understand marine signage and the ‘rules’ of the waterway, we made our mistakes and learned amongst hundreds of other craft – powered and sail. It was a tricky place to learn! Like having your first driving lessons in the middle of Calcutta!
Contrast this to learning to sail our new yacht on the pristine and uncluttered waters of the Princess Royal Harbour and King George Sound.
Albany truly is blessed. Superlatives abound. And it is no cliché!
The Albany region was first home to the Menang Noongar people, who made use of the area during the summer months for fishing and other activities. They called the area Kinjarling which means "the place of rain".
The town we now know as Albany was first established in late 1826, when Major Edmund Lockyer, together with a contingent of convicts, soldiers, a surgeon and storekeeper, left Sydney aboard the Amity bound for King George III Sound. The Amity sailed into Princess Royal Harbour, one of the world’s largest natural harbours, on Christmas Day 1826. Earlier, successive explorers included George Vancouver, who entered and named King George III Sound and Princess Royal Harbour in 1791, but settlement did not occur until Lockyer’s arrival. Whalers and sealers working the Southern Ocean were also frequenting the area by the 1820s and on one of the quiet coves of King George Sound there remains a now-shut down whaling station, open daily for tours. Adjacent to the town itself, a replica of the brig Amity stands proudly on the shore line for visitors to explore.
Lockyer selected the site, making the pretty town the birthplace of West Australian settlement. He named his new town 'Frederickstown', after King George III's second son, His Royal Highness Prince Frederick Augustus, Duke of York and Albany – better known from the children’s nursery rhyme, The Grand Old Duke Of York! The name was changed to Albany 5 years later in 1831 when the settlement was transferred to the control of the Swan River Colony. Locals are happy to tell you that Albany should have been the capital of West Australia, but how happy they are that it is not! Famous Australian writer and poet Henry Lawson travelled to Albany in early 1890, where he worked and wrote for the Albany Observer newspaper. On his return to Sydney in September 1890, he wrote of his time in Albany, 'Albany will never change much - it is a pretty town, but vague. It seems to exist only in a somewhere-on-the-horizon sort of way; I like it all the better for that.'
We set out sailing for the day as the crystal clear waters of Princess Royal Harbour softly ripple in the breeze. We’ve packed a picnic lunch, planning to drop anchor and settle on the roomy deck and idle away the glorious day! The early peoples called Albany the place of rain and these days this whole coastline is known as the Rainbow Coast. Rain falls frequently but it is also true that rainbows abound! But none are present this day. We are heading out into King George Sound, through the well maintained Ataturk entrance – named following the contribution of that president of Turkey to the fledgling town.
We trawl a baited line and happily pull in some tuna, enough for dinner. Apart from us there is only one other yacht out and we have almost the whole harbour and Sound to ourselves.
The westerly wind pushes us towards Seal rock and to our delight some seals are visible. As we tack and turn towards Breaksea Island to the north of us, we are treated to the spectacular arrival of a mother whale and her calf. She’s teaching him to swim it seems, or simply trying to entertain us! There are several whale watching tours that go out once or twice daily in the whale watching season (June to October as the giant creatures migrate) as well as several charters that will take groups out – often the only other vessels out on the water.
King George Sound is a whale watchers haven with entire pods frolicking around on any given day. Sometimes they even venture into the more sheltered waters of Princess Royal Harbour, visible then even to shoppers strolling through the town!
The granite boulders that rise up majestically all around us from the clear waters of the Sound provide an incredibly picturesque backdrop for our sailing – how unlike anything we have ever seen on the East Coast!
We sail past Michaelmas Island and can see the great Southern Ocean beyond it. We have ventured out a few times, heading most recently towards Denmark with its beautiful beaches and protected coves to the west. When we leave the sheltered waters of King George Sound next we will be heading east and our first stop will be Two People’s Bay, where we will drop the anchor over-night. This is an easy day’s sail - a very pretty destination with excellent holding. Beyond that is Bremer Bay, another beautiful spot just 24 hours away with a picturesque harbour and excellent anchorages – our second over-night stop as we head towards the Bight. We realise that by the time we leave we will have barely scratched the surface as far as exploring this amazing place goes, but we must go when the weather pattern will be right for us to say our goodbyes to the friends we have made and begin our circumnavigation.
The Southern Ocean doesn’t scare us any more. We have learned so much while we prepared the yacht for the first part of our journey and prepared ourselves. We have spent hours talking to and learning from Mark McRae from Southern Ocean Sailing, our very favorite new friend.
We turn back then and head across the expanse of the Sound, watching all the while for more whales and drop our anchor in 3 or 4 meters of crystal clear water and watch it easily bed in the clean sand in a picturesque cove near Frenchmans Bay out past Vancouver Peninsular to enjoy our lunch. While we are getting things organised the children swim in the enticing water and debate putting the dinghy in so they can row the short distance to the shore where the sand of Goode Beach is so white it seems almost translucent.
We live on board the yacht and can sail whenever the wind is right and yet it is still a thrill to let off the mooring lines and feel the sense of freedom, of abandon that comes as the wind fills the sails and the boat glides and sashays through the water.
As we return after another delightful day sailing in the Sound, we pass Middleton beach, a very popular spot, boasting the whitest sand you will see anywhere. We pass the entrance to Oyster Harbour, barely visible until you are right upon it. It’s easy to miss but leads to a narrow but well-marked channel into another very protected harbour where you will find the home of Albany’s fishing fleet, a large swimming enclosure and the Emu Point Slipway. We spent a very busy week with our yacht on the hard here, the first time we had ever slipped a boat. Darren, the shipwright, was exceedingly helpful and after checking, fixing and anti-fouling we happily watched as our yacht was re-floated. The 40 ton hoist boat Lifter can deal with even the biggest boats, and sits adjacent to a large chandlery providing most resources boaters will need as well as one of our favourite places to eat in the town – the Squid Shack where local squid and oysters are cooked to perfection!
Back in through the entrance we sail past the port of Albany wharfs where there is a tanker tied up loading up its cargo. Cruise ships also make use of this wharf for a day every now and then as they make their way around the country, stopping in to Albany and giving a much appreciated boost to the local economy.
And so, one warm, sunny morning in October we untied our mooring lines for the last time and set off. Sad to say goodbye to a town that had welcomed us and made us feel so at home, yet excited too to be beginning such a life-changing journey.
We had learned while in Albany, of the incredible place the town holds in our Anzac history. This was where the ships gathered, where the soldiers boarded awaiting their departure en-mass for Gallipoli. King George Sound was, at the end, filled with ships, provisioning, preparing and waiting to leave. The shores of Albany, the town, the islands of King George Sound were the last sight many of them ever had of home.
The town will play a major role in the 2014 and 2015 Centenary commemorations. Plans are underway for a re-enactment of both the departure of the convoy and the first ever dawn service for it was here on April 25th 1923 that this was first held, where the Reverend Arthur White first proclaimed, ‘as the sun rises and goeth down, we will remember them’.
We knew none of this when we arrived, but soon acquainted ourselves with this amazing information and as well as taking in local historic sights, buildings and ships, we strolled sombrely through the Anzac Peace Park, reading the story of Albany’s unique place in Australia’s history.
On the morning that we left Albany we felt in a small way an affinity with those early courageous men and women. We were not heading to war or certain death but we left with a sense of their spirit in us too, that indomitable thing that abounds in our culture, that almost reckless spirit of adventure that took so many young men unwittingly to their deaths.
We were prepared, there was nothing reckless about our pushing out past the entrance to the inner harbour that day. We were off though, like them, not completely sure what we would encounter ahead, but carrying within us something we didn’t have before we had arrived in Albany – it had imparted something to us while we had readied ourselves and we are forever changed as a result. What a joy it will be to sail back in when we complete what we set out to - our slow meandering circumnavigation of Australia!
Proudly powered by Weebly