Marina service
Cape Jaffa Anchorage (Solas Bay Marina)
About
Cape Jaffa Anchorage (Solas Bay Marina) at a glance
Operational marina at Cape Jaffa on Lacepede Bay (recently dredged and rebranded Solas Bay), with berths including waterfront-allotment private berths and boat ramp access. Cape Jaffa Marine Facilities alongside provide a boat lift, secure boat and trailer storage, hardstand and short-term berthing, with diesel sales by prior arrangement.
Service area: Limestone Coast
- Marina type
- full-service marina
- Operator
- Solas Bay / Cape Jaffa Marine Facilities
- Region
- Limestone Coast
- Water body
- Lacepede Bay
- Dry storage
- hardstand
- Berth types
- permanent berthing, casual berthing
Facilities and services
- fuel
- travel lift
- hardstand
- dry stack storage
- boat ramp
- power & water
- secure boat and trailer storage
- short-term berthing
- diesel sales by prior arrangement
- ASCOM travel lift haul-out
- council launch permit system
- power and water at berths
About Cape Jaffa Anchorage (Solas Bay Marina)
Cape Jaffa Anchorage, recently rebranded Solas Bay, is a canal-and-breakwater marina on Lacepede Bay on South Australia's Limestone Coast, midway between Robe and Kingston SE. It grew out of a joint proposal by the Kingston District Council and the Cape Jaffa Development Company to give the local professional fishing and aquaculture fleet a proper home and to open a north-facing stretch of coast to waterfront housing; the original scheme reserved berths for more than twenty commercial operators alongside recreational berths and private waterfront-allotment moorings. The marina's defining struggle is sand. Lacepede Bay's littoral drift continually pushes sediment into the entrance, and the marina has required repeated large-scale dredging campaigns, including a major program that removed seagrass and sand from the entrance area. Storm activity in September 2024 undid much of that work, and further storms through 2025 left the marina mouth unnavigable, prompting a marine engineering report recommending the removal or relocation of around 850,000 cubic metres of material over eight to ten years, including construction of a substantial sand trap. Council closed the entrance to mariners until dredging could re-open it. Despite that battle the harbour is busy and useful when open: southern rock lobster and finfish boats work from it, trailer boats launch for the bay's fishing, and Cape Jaffa Marine Facilities operates alongside providing lift, storage and berthing services to both sectors. The residential side of the project has matured too, with holiday houses and permanent homes ringing the canals, so the marina functions as both a working harbour and the front yard of a small coastal community.
Marina facilities
Services at Cape Jaffa split between the council-managed marina and ramp and the private Cape Jaffa Marine Facilities yard beside it. The marina basin offers permanent and casual berths, including private berths fronting waterfront allotments, with power and fresh water available at berths and vehicle parking ashore. Kingston District Council runs the public boat ramp: launch permits have been priced at ten dollars a day or one hundred dollars a year, collected through the council office, which asks users to phone 08 8767 2033 to confirm the facility's status before travelling; ramp permits were suspended outright while the entrance was closed pending dredging. Cape Jaffa Marine Facilities, contactable on 0428 854 917, operates an ASCOM travel lift for haul-outs, a hardstand for vessels on stands, secure gated boat and trailer storage, dry storage options and short-term berthing for commercial and recreational boats, and sells diesel by prior arrangement, which makes advance notice essential for refuelling. There is no public fuel wharf operating around the clock, no chandlery and no resident repair trade beyond what the yard arranges, so larger works are typically planned in conjunction with the lift booking. The marina mouth and channel are dredged as funding and conditions allow, and depth over the entrance bar varies with the season's weather; Notices to Mariners carry the current status. For an out-of-the-way coast the combination of lift, hardstand, storage and berthing is unusually complete, and it underpins both the professional fleet and the steady trailer-boat trade from Adelaide, Mount Gambier and western Victoria.
Local sailing knowledge
Lacepede Bay is an open, shallow bight facing the Southern Ocean, and Cape Jaffa's entrance sits between low breakwaters where sand accretion is a permanent condition rather than an occasional nuisance. The single most important piece of local knowledge is to verify the entrance status before departure: the Kingston District Council publishes updates, SA marine safety Notices to Mariners flag closures, and after heavy winter weather the bar can shoal quickly even when formally open. Inside, the basin is protected and calm. When the entrance is navigable the fishing justifies the effort, with snapper, whiting and crayfish the drawcards, and the professional lobster fleet's movements are a good guide to conditions. The old Cape Jaffa lighthouse, which stood offshore on Margaret Brock Reef for a century, was dismantled and re-erected on the Kingston SE foreshore, and its story explains why this coast earned a reputation among mariners long before the marina was dug. Ashore there is little beyond the development itself: Robe, about thirty kilometres south, is the nearest town for provisioning, dining and marine supplies, with Kingston SE a similar distance north; the Cape Jaffa area offers a caravan park, beach access and the marina precinct. The bay's north-facing beach is one of the few sheltered swimming stretches on this coast. For cruising yachts, the anchorage's history matters: before the breakwaters, Cape Jaffa was an open roadstead used by fishing boats in settled weather only, and in strong south-easterlies it still demands respect. Skippers arriving from the west generally run inside the Margaret Brock Reef, keeping the charted marks in sight, and tides here are modest but the bar responds more to wind and swell than to any tide table.