For this Up the Creek adventure you’ll need a small boat and a large appetite – for tricky navigation, old boats and boatyards, absorbing history, and craft beers in equal measure. An Up the Creek with a brewery as a destination. What’s not to like? But wait – there’s a catch. Read on.
To get there, it’s a 36-nautical-mile trip north of Auckland or Waiheke (where we left from), past Kawau Island, the Tawharanui Peninsula, and then into the deep Omaha Bay and the harbour mouth at the northern end of Omaha surf beach.
Here’s where your navigation test starts, with the chartplotter warning not to enter the sometimes shoaling, fast-current-flowing Whangateau Harbour entrance without local knowledge. So time it for slack or incoming tide, and be sure to keep to the deepest water if you have a deep draught boat.
Once inside the harbour mouth, the wide estuary welcomes you. But it’s deceptive, for most of it is very shallow. There are moorings and a limited anchoring space just behind Ti Point on the right of the harbour entrance, with a public jetty there too. Straight ahead is a tidal channel leading to the Whangateau Traditional Boatyard. To the left is a line of moorings in a channel leading southwards just behind the Omaha sandspit. We noticed these boats tugging fiercely at their mooring chains in
