Marina service
The Strand Marina
About
The Strand Marina at a glance
Floating-dock marina of 90 berths for boats from 8m to 23m at 34 The Strand, Williamstown, with cafe and restaurant on the waterfront.
Service area: Port Phillip Bay (Melbourne)
- Marina type
- full-service marina
- Region
- Port Phillip Bay (Melbourne)
- Water body
- Hobsons Bay
- Wet berths
- 90
- Maximum vessel
- 23 m
- Berth types
- casual berthing, permanent berthing
Facilities and services
- power & water
- showers & laundry
- restaurant/cafe
- pump-out
- porta-potty hopper
- wifi
- ensuites
- visitor berths
- car parking
- security cameras
- brokerage and charter links
About The Strand Marina
The waterfront at 34 The Strand has served boats since the 1890s, when Parsons' boatshed and jetty on the site ran a boat hire and marine services business catering to the tall ships and steamships that crowded Hobsons Bay in Williamstown's working-port era. The first marina on the site went in during the 1940s, a timber and concrete structure that aged along with the suburb around it, until the whole thing was demolished and rebuilt in the mid-2000s as a modern floating marina by Bellingham Marine. In a gesture to the site's past, timber from the old marina was recycled into walkways and hardstand areas, so the finished facility mixes new floating docks with salvaged fabric from its predecessor. The marina, long operated as the Anchorage Marina and known locally by its Strand address, holds around 90 berths for boats from 8 to 23 metres, and it is inseparable from the building at its root: the Anchorage Restaurant, run by the O'Hare family for more than two decades, stands built out over the water with views across the bay to the Melbourne skyline, and the cafe and restaurant trade gives the place a different rhythm from the club marinas further along Nelson Place. Twenty of the berths are set aside for visitors, which signals the marina's role as Williamstown's destination dock: pull in, tie up, step ashore and eat, with the heritage streetscape of The Strand and the lawns of the Commonwealth Reserve right at the gate. It is the most publicly accessible of the Williamstown berthing options, aimed as much at the cruising visitor as at the permanent berth holder.
Marina facilities
The marina's 90 berths run on floating docks for vessels between 8 and 23 metres, with extra-wide walkways that were a deliberate feature of the Bellingham rebuild, and service units from Marine Technologies delivering 240-volt shore power and water at the berth. Twenty dedicated visitor berths are held for casual and overnight stays, bookable through the marina office on (03) 9397 4740, and permanent berthing fills the balance of the pens. A sewerage pump-out facility is provided along with a porta-potty emptying hopper, an uncommon and genuinely useful piece of infrastructure for liveaboards and visiting cruisers. On shore, berth holders and visitors share ensuites and laundry facilities, and the marina provides wireless internet access, internet camera security across the docks and car parking for berth holders. There is no fuel berth and no travel lift on site; for haul-out and heavy work, berth holders are pointed to the marina's relationships with the local marine services cluster, including the Savages Wharf boatyard and club yards a few hundred metres along the foreshore, which effectively extends the service offering well beyond the site boundary. Food is the on-site strength: the cafe and the over-water restaurant at the marina's base have collected awards over the years and serve breakfast through dinner with the city skyline as the view, so a crew can genuinely berth, dine and sleep without leaving the property. Hire boats, charter operators and boat brokerage have also operated from the site at various times, and the management maintains strong links with the local marine trade network for anything the marina itself cannot supply.
Local sailing knowledge
Arriving at The Strand is one of the simpler landfalls on Port Phillip. Hobsons Bay is deep and open for marina-sized craft, the Williamstown foreshore reads clearly on the chart, and the marina sits just west of the Ferguson Street Pier; the only real caution is the shipping, since the channels into the Yarra and the Port of Melbourne run close enough that big-ship traffic is a constant backdrop and an occasional reason to hold off a crossing. There are no bars, bridges or locks between the bay and the berth. Once tied up, everything is on foot: The Strand's strip of cafes faces the marina across the road, the Commonwealth Reserve and Gem Pier with the HMAS Castlemaine museum ship lie immediately along the waterfront, and Nelson Place's full run of restaurants and pubs starts a few minutes' walk south. The Williamstown ferry berths at Gem Pier for runs to Southgate and St Kilda, handy for collecting crew from the city. For an evening anchored out rather than berthed, the water west of the piers gives reasonable shelter in northerlies, and several of the visiting yachts that use the marina alternate nights between a pen and the anchorage. Skippers heading further afield use Williamstown as the jumping-off point for the run down the bay to Sorrento and Queenscliff or the passage through the Heads, and it is equally the first civilised stop for boats arriving from Bass Strait. The marina's visitor berths fill fast on summer weekends and event days, so ringing ahead is standard practice.