Marina service
Tambo River Jetty (Johnsonville)
About
Tambo River Jetty (Johnsonville) at a glance
Public jetties on the Tambo River allowing 4-hour stays by day and overnight stays, with boat ramp, hot showers and BBQ facilities; river entrance can be shallow at low tide.
Service area: East Gippsland
- Marina type
- government/transport wharf-marina
- Operator
- East Gippsland Shire
- Region
- East Gippsland
- Water body
- Tambo River
- Berth types
- casual berthing
Facilities and services
- boat ramp
- showers & laundry
- free overnight berthing
- BBQ & picnic parkland
- new toilet/shower block (hot showers 8am-8pm)
- water at jetty
- fishing platforms
About Tambo River Jetty (Johnsonville)
Tambo River Jetty at Johnsonville is the opposite of a commercial marina: a pair of public jetties on the lower Tambo River, run as open foreshore infrastructure under the East Gippsland Shire, and one of the most useful free overnight stops on the Gippsland Lakes system. Johnsonville is a small rural township on the Princes Highway between Bairnsdale and Lakes Entrance, and its waterfront precinct wraps around the Harry Clues memorial park, with the jetties, a boat ramp on Punt Road, picnic and barbecue shelters and a park toilet and shower block. The Tambo here is genuinely handsome river country, wide and deep between farmland banks, and the jetties serve two distinct crowds. Trailer boats launch at the ramp to fish the lower river and Lake King, while cruising yachts and motorboats from the lakes tie up for the night, particularly when weather on the open lakes turns sour and a snug river berth beats a lumpy anchorage. Stays are limited to four hours between 8am and 6pm for day users, but overnight berthing is permitted and costs nothing. There are no staff, no fuel and no power; what the jetty offers is shelter, hot showers and a park, plus a short walk to a general store. A recent upgrade replaced the ageing amenities with a new toilet and shower block, a small but telling investment in what has become a fixture of the East Gippsland cruising circuit. Trailer-sailor forums describe the jetty as a traditional launch-and-sleep stop, and on summer weekends the foreshore fills with boat trailers from across Gippsland.
Marina facilities
Facilities are honest and basic, and worth stating plainly. The public jetties allow four-hour stays between 0800 and 1800, with overnight berthing permitted and no charge or booking; space is first come, first served, and rafting is common on busy weekends. Water is available at the waterfront precinct, and the park provides toilets, barbecues and a shower block with hot showers operating between 8am and 8pm; the amenity block was rebuilt in recent years after lobbying from the boating community. The single-lane boat ramp off Punt Road near the jetty handles trailer boats, with parking on the foreshore, and launching fees do not apply at Victorian public ramps. There is no fuel, no power on the jetties, no pump-out, no lift or repair facilities, and no security beyond the goodwill of a small town; crews lock up and self-manage. What support exists lies in Johnsonville itself: about twenty minutes on foot brings a general store, a fuel station and a bottle shop, enough for basic provisioning and ice. For anything mechanical, the nearest marine services are at Lakes Entrance, roughly 18 kilometres downriver and across Lake King, or at Bairnsdale up the highway. The jetties' real service is shelter: the river is deep and wide enough for passing vessels to lie comfortably, holding is good, and the berth is protected from the lake chop that makes Nicholson or the open Lake King anchorages miserable in a southerly buster. East Gippsland Shire maintains the precinct, and the fishing platforms and parkland see steady use from land-based anglers as well.
Local sailing knowledge
The entrance to the Tambo from Lake King is the critical piece of local knowledge: the bar at the river mouth shoals to around 1.2 metres at low tide, and deeper-keeled yachts time their entry and exit for the top half of the tide. Once inside, the river is deep, wide and forgiving, easily handling two-way traffic, and the run up to the jetties passes the Harry Clues memorial park on the point. Upstream, the river continues navigable for several kilometres past farmland to Swan Reach, where another public jetty sits just below the Princes Highway bridge, handy to the Swan Reach Hotel but without toilets; the bridge clearance is 6.6 metres at mean tide level, which rules out taller rigs. Beyond Swan Reach the river winds about five kilometres through a rural reach past the Tambo cliffs before narrowing and clogging with fallen timber, which is where most powered craft turn back. Fishing is the big draw: the Tambo is one of the lakes system's noted bream rivers, with estuary perch and mulloway also taken, and the river mouth into Lake King fishes well after rain. The jetty's role as a weather refuge is well established among lakes cruisers; when a south-westerly whips Lake King into a steep chop, the run up the Tambo is the standard escape. Trailer sailors commonly overnight here after launching or before retrieving, and the new shower block gets a regular mention in cruising forums. Fuel jetties and supplies at Paynesville or Lakes Entrance cover everything the township cannot.