About
Two Rocks Marina at a glance
DoT-managed marina 63 km north of Perth serving the commercial crayfishing fleet and recreational boaters, offering berthing, slipping, servicing, storage and commercial leasing. A 40-tonne boat lifter handles vessels up to 22 m, with 24/7 diesel, a two-lane ramp and pen-holder amenities.
Service area: Perth Metro
- Marina type
- full-service marina
- Operator
- Department of Transport and Major Infrastructure (DTMI)
- Region
- Perth Metro
- Water body
- Indian Ocean
- Dry storage
- Yes (large asphalt hardstand)
- Maximum vessel
- 20 m
- Berth types
- casual berthing, permanent berthing
Facilities and services
- fuel
- power & water
- showers & laundry
- boat ramp
- travel lift
- hardstand
- repairs & maintenance
- 24/7 security
- slipway
- 24/7 card-access diesel (Bailey's Marine Fuels)
- universal access pontoon
- forklift and operator hire
- water blasting
- pen-holder laundry
- commercial leasing
- 125 pens
About Two Rocks Marina
Few WA marinas carry an origin story like Two Rocks. The harbour 63 kilometres north of Perth grew out of Alan Bond's Yanchep Sun City scheme of the early 1970s, built as a construction and training base around his America's Cup campaigns, and the streets ashore are still named after Cup yachts. Bond's Sun City Precinct paired the marina with the Atlantis Marine Park theme park, which opened on Boxing Day 1981 with performing dolphins and a ten-metre limestone King Neptune statue on the hill; the park closed in 1990, but King Neptune still stands, restored in 2022, and in January 2023 the whole precinct, marina included, was added to the State Register of Heritage Places. Underneath the nostalgia, though, this is a working port. Two Rocks has long been a home base for the western rock lobster fleet, and cray boats share the harbour with recreational pens and the trailer-boat crowd heading out after dhufish. The marina is managed by the Department of Transport and Major Infrastructure, which keeps the tone practical: this is a state boating facility with a lifter, a fuel jetty and a fishing fleet, not a polished residential marina with cafes on the boardwalk. The township around it is slowly regrowing as Perth's northern corridor pushes past Yanchep, and a $6 million upgrade of the complex has been approved, but the character remains what it has been since the Bond era: half fishing port, half suburban boat harbour. Approval has been given for a $6 million upgrade of the complex, a sign the state intends the harbour to keep working rather than become a museum piece.
Marina facilities
The marina holds 125 boat pens serving recreational owners and the commercial rock lobster fleet, arranged around a service wharf and jetty fitted with single and three-phase power, water and lighting. Diesel is available 24 hours a day, seven days, supplied by Bailey's Marine Fuels on a fuel-card basis through Ampol; there is no casual bowser petrol, so plan fuel before you leave Perth. The boat lifting yard runs a 40-tonne lifter, a 1995 Cummins unit, rated for vessels up to 22 metres long with a 7.1-metre beam, and lifting slots are booked through DTMI on 1300 863 308 during weekday office hours or via the dedicated lifter email. Around the lift well sits a large asphalt hardstand used for vessel and trailer storage, with wash-down areas and a water-blasting service, forklift and operator hire, and power and water laid on to hardstand positions. Trailer boaters get a concrete two-lane launching ramp with a floating jetty on the southern side of the harbour, a universal access pontoon to its north reserved for recreational and emergency vessels, and parking for 82 car-and-trailer rigs plus 57 cars. Pen holders have their own toilets, showers and laundry, while a public universal-access toilet block stands near the ramp. Fees follow the department's published maritime facilities schedule, and casual berthing is available when pens are free. Commercial leasing rounds out the mix, and contract lifter operators keep the yard running day to day. The one live navigational caveat the department publishes is a build-up of sand inside the entrance, which has cut both depths and channel width.
Local sailing knowledge
Two Rocks faces the open Indian Ocean with nothing between the breakwater and Africa, so passage planning starts with the swell forecast. The entrance channel sits at roughly 31.495 south, 115.580 east, and DTMI's standing advice about sand build-up inside the entrance means deeper-keeled boats should favour the top half of the tide and watch the leads. There is no island shelter here; when the summer sea breeze stands in from the south-west at 20 knots, the run home is square into it. The reward offshore is serious fishing: dhufish, pink snapper and samson fish on the inshore reefs, cray pot country within sight of the tower blocks that never quite arrived, and tuna and marlin for those running wider. The cray fleet works from the harbour through the season, and their comings and goings set the mood on the wharf. Ashore, the Sun City Yacht Club, founded in the Bond years, runs summer programs from the marina, and the restored King Neptune statue on the ridge makes a useful navigation mark from seaward. Yanchep Lagoon, a few minutes south, is the local snorkelling and swimming spot when the ocean is up. Provisioning is modest at the Two Rocks shops, so most crews stock up at Yanchep or Butler on the drive north. Hillarys Boat Harbour, 40-odd kilometres down the coast, is the fallback when the weather turns, and Rottnest lies roughly 50 kilometres offshore to the south-west for a longer day run in settled conditions. Fuel of the petrol variety, bait and ice are limited close to the ramp, so the standard local routine is to arrive with tanks full and the esky loaded, then top the diesel by card at the service wharf on the way home.