Marina service
Pelican Shores Cafe & Marina
About
Pelican Shores Cafe & Marina at a glance
Absolute waterfront cafe and small marina on Sussex Inlet, offering waterfront dining, boat hire, bait and tackle and functions; overlooks the inlet's moorings and boating channel to St Georges Basin.
Service area: Shoalhaven
- Marina type
- full-service marina
- Operator
- Pelican Shores
- Region
- Shoalhaven
- Water body
- Sussex Inlet
Facilities and services
- restaurant/cafe
- boat hire (tinnies, kayaks, SUPs)
- fuel pit stop
- bait and tackle
- kiosk
- on-water takeaway delivery
- functions
- BYO
- deck dining
About Pelican Shores Cafe & Marina
Pelican Shores is what passes for a marina in a town built around fishing and family holidays: an absolute waterfront cafe with a small working frontage at 28 Sussex Road, Sussex Inlet, where the tables sit so close to the tide that diners watch pelicans begging off the moored boats. The business combines breakfast and lunch dining, a kiosk, boat hire, bait and tackle and functions in one relaxed, BYO operation, and on Friday and Saturday evenings the deck opens for dinner when bookings fill fast in holiday season. The outlook is the point of difference. Across the inlet's moorings and the main boating channel, the view runs toward St Georges Basin, with hire tinnies and kayaks nosing in and out of the wharf between courses. Reviews consistently single out generous seafood platters, an all-day breakfast and staff who know the waterway, and the place functions as an informal information desk for visiting boaters. Sussex Inlet itself is a canal-estate town strung along a seven-kilometre tidal inlet linking the Basin to the ocean at Wreck Bay, so almost every local trip involves water, and Pelican Shores sits at the centre of that rhythm. It is not a marina in the berth-and-fuel-pontoon sense; it is the kind of hybrid waterfront business that small NSW coastal towns do well, where you can hire a kayak, eat grilled local fish and watch the channel run past your table. Holiday-makers returning year after year treat it as a fixed point of their Sussex routine, and the coffee trade from early-morning boat crews heading for the Basin is a quiet mainstay of the business.
Marina facilities
The service mix here is built for casual and visiting boaters rather than berth holders. The cafe trades for breakfast and lunch daily, with fresh seafood featuring on weekends and holiday periods, a menu running from grilled seafood platters to pasta, and BYO drinks; reservations are taken on 02 4441 3099, and the Friday and Saturday deck dinners require a booking. A kiosk handles takeaway, and the on-water takeaway service delivers food and treats directly to boats and paddlecraft on the waterway, a touch regulars love. Boat hire covers tinnies, kayaks and stand-up paddleboards, organised through Dennis on 0414 579 255, with life vests sized for the whole family included, and hire craft are intended for use within the inlet and Basin. Fuel is available as a pit stop for boats topping up before a day out, and the shop sells bait and tackle for the inlet's famous fishing. Functions are catered at the waterfront site, and the moorings and small marina frontage allow customers to arrive by boat and tie up while they eat. For anything beyond this, visiting skippers use the town's other services: Sussex Inlet Marine Centre hires boats and offers visitor mooring spots for a small daily fee, boat ramps at Nielson Lane, Jacobs Drive, Lions Park and Riverside cover launching, and the Sussex Inlet and Basin Yacht Club welcomes sailors on Swan Lake and the Basin in season. Trading hours can shift during school holiday peaks, so checking the cafe's social pages before a planned stop is wise.
Local sailing knowledge
Sussex Inlet is a narrow tidal channel running about seven kilometres between St Georges Basin and the sea at Wreck Bay, and everything about boating here turns on that geography. The ocean entrance is a genuine coastal bar: Transport for NSW maintains a live webcam and weather feed for the crossing, currents run hard near the entrance, and the channel shifts, so check conditions and local advice before heading outside, and treat an ebb tide against a southerly swell with respect. Inside, the inlet is protected and forgiving, and the Basin beyond it is a big, open lake with no speed restrictions in many areas, which makes it tow-sport and fishing territory. The town's canal estates let many visitors keep their boat at their holiday house. Fishing is the local religion, flathead, bream and whiting in the inlet, tailor and salmon off the beaches, and an annual fishing carnival draws big crowds. Practical stops: bait and a coffee at Pelican Shores, fuel and hire at the Marine Centre near the bridge, dinner at the RSL's Bamboo River or the Bowling Club, and a cruise across the Basin to the villages on the far shore. Swan Lake, five minutes west, is the sailing club's home water, and the surf beach at the entrance gives the kids an ocean option on calm days. The town sits roughly 50 kilometres south of Nowra and about 204 kilometres from Sydney, with Jervis Bay's beaches and Huskisson's whale-watching fleet an easy side trip by road. Jervis Bay Territory's white shoreline forms the backdrop on the far bank of the inlet's mouth.