Date: 26/4/2026
Trip leader: Bruce Stafford
Party: Bingqi, Hemu, Jiawei, Jinghan, Kimberly, Patrick Trelawny, Wentao, Xin*, Yufan*, Yuzhuo, Zichen (*late joiners)
Umina – Pearl Beach – Patonga Walk 26/4/26
(I just noticed the symmetry of the date!).
Fine weather and a pleasantly warm day made for a nice walk along this route which can be difficult to do in hot weather. It was a very pleasant walk on a day in the middle of a long weekend holiday. Ten of us met up at Woy Woy station (except Xin and Yufan who missed the train and joined us much later). Then it was a short bus ride to the south end of Umina Beach where we started the walk. We called in along the way at the shop near the bus stop as someone wanted to buy a hat, and a child was also giving out free samples of flavoured biscuits!
On arrival at the beach we noticed that the tide was very low, with a long wide strand of sandy beach. That very low tide also made it very easy to walk along to the rock shelf below Mount Ettalong (which can’t be done at high tide). But then a fairly hard but short climb up the cliff on large boulders was necessary to reach the track under Mount Ettalong which is actually an old road to Pearl Beach.
It is now very eroded and narrow in places (and the local council has signs warning of rock falls!). Nevertheless we walked along it with its great views of Broken Bay until we came to Pearl Beach. Then just a short clamber down to the sandy beach. Pearl Beach gets its name from the coarser sand it has which is more rounded and like tiny pearls.
So we walked along the one km of sand until reaching the end of the beach, and then onto Tourmaline Avenue to go to Crommelin Arboretum (an arboretum is a botanic garden for trees only). Chatting with Patrick along the way I missed the turn onto Opal Avenue and had to back-track 75 metres or so (a warning not to be distracted by chatting!) On Opal Avenue is the north entrance to the Arboretum. There are several tracks to follow there and we took one which went past some native bee hives, and a Wollemi Pine. Australian native bees do not sting; at present there are no European honey bees on the Central Coast as they were removed due to the Varroa mite outbreak.
Then we explored another track winding through the bush there and were surprised to come to a sign which read “University of Sydney. Private Property. No access“. It was the Uni’s biological field station at Pearl Beach. There was no fence there however so we just followed a wide trail which eventually led back along winding ways to the platform near the shelter shed, on which we sat for morning tea.
Here I handed out some ANZAC Biscuits (NOT “Cookies“) which everyone seemed to like. They were also liked by a Kookaburra which we noticed in te tree above us looking down at us. Suddenly it swooped down and took a biscuit out of Jinghuan’s hand!
We discussed why ANZAC Biscuits cannot be called “ANZAC Cookies” as the name is legally protected. We also discussed the Pinyin System (putting Chinese words into the Latin Alphabet) as a certain aspect of it became clear when I was watching ABC’s Economics reporter David Chow on the ABC News. Some SUBW members have that surname which is spelled “Chou” in Pinyin, and I have pronounced it as “Chew” as an English speaker would. The Pinyin System though is not meant to be only for English but also other European languages and “Chou” would be pronounced as “Chow” by a French speaker. The name has been spelled “Chow” in Australia for over 150 years (and is also a colloquial word for “food,” especially in rural regions). And there’s Chicken Chow Mein which I am sure a certain person likes along with Mongolian Beef!
The language discussion also included the problem of English “inheriting” only five vowel letters from Latin when we have about 15 vowel sounds; that makes it harder to learn English as a second language. And linguistic traps like the two different “L’ sounds like in ‘Liverpool”. Russian puts a symbol that looks like “b” after a soft L (last one in ‘Liverpool”) but in English you just have to know! It might be hard to get the large American English speaking group to agree to extra letters as they still won’t even agree to change to coloured plastic money or the Metric System (sorry, Americans!).
After this philosophical language discussion we then left the Arboretum and walked along Crystal Avenue to its end where also the main entrance to the Uni’s field station is located. From here I led the group along a bush track that rises steeply and is VERY vague for the first 50 metres (a warning to anyone else who might try it) and then sort of levels out following the contour of the ridge line for a while. Eventually it reaches a point where there is a pass up the steep cliff and after about 75 metres it comes out at the Pearl Beach Fire Trail. It is quite rough and indistinct in places but there is evidence that it was once used as a horse trail to Patonga about 100 years ago. The photos might illustrate this.
The Pearl Beach Fire Trail was welcome after this hard track, and we followed it to Warrah Lookout for a needed water break. Warrah Lookout has a fine view over the Hawkesbury River estuary and Barrenjoey Head and Palm Beach. I mentioned to Patrick (who’s family is in the U.S.) that it is quite possible that there are German Mines from WW2 still sitting on the sea bed off Barrenjoey, laid there by the German minelayer ship “Pinguin” in 1940. It is significant for U.S. history because a mine laid by the same ship caused the first U.S. WW2 maritime casualty when the merchant ship “City of Rayville” was sunk by a German mine from “Pinguin” in Bass Strait between Victoria and Tasmania in November 1940. Probably very few Americans would know about that incident because, well, Hollywood can’t really make much of a movie out of it!
The other more likely danger in the Hawkesbury Estuary is the presence of sharks, especially after a long period of rainy weather. That’s why no one (except some tourists) swim at Patonga. We saw some jet ski riders in the river, and if they fell off they could become lunch for sharks (“meals on skis”!).
After the water break at Warrah Lookout we went back to the fire trail and then onto the track (which at this point forms part of “The Great North Walk”) down to Patonga. This track descends quite gradually for some distance before starting to drop down quite steeply down the ridge, and is quite rough and eroded in places. It is a relief when it comes out on the sand at Patonga. From there it was a simple walk to the cricket pavilion at Patonga’s Eve Williams Memorial Oval. Patrick discovered the wait times for food at Patonga’s only eatery (and I suspect the cost as well, Patonga is becoming trendy).
After lunch we retraced our steps back to Pearl Beach and that meant doing the fairly rough and steep half-km climb back up the Great North Walk track which rises from sea level to 120m elevation in that distance.
Then it levelled out for another half-km until reachingthe Pearl Beach Fire Trail.and stayed on that Trail all the way back to Crystal Avenue Pearl Beach with the exception that we did not go down the rough bush track we climbed on the way up. By then it was past 3pm and the long shadows cast by the trees made the Trail look quite picturesque. On Crystal Avenue there is a piano outside that people passing by can play; one of our group had a go.
We made our way along Diamond Avenue with a brief pause at the War Memorial, and Patrick and I noticed that the rest of the group had got ahead of us because we had stopped earlier on Crystal Avenue to get that photo of the Bush Turkey. I got out my air horn and gave two short blasts to bring them back as they had overshot the road to the beach (Amethyst Road). Air horn very useful – saves shouting!
Then down to the beach to relax before the bus came, which was 20 minutes as it was a bit late. While there, Xin and Yufan came up to us; it turned out that they had missed the train and got the next one and did their own self-directed walk from Woy Woy to Pearl Beach!
I was concerned that we might miss the 4.41pm Sydney train at Woy Woy but the bus made up some time and got there 6 minutes before the train to Sydney arrived. I however had a 23 minute wait for my train.
So everyone liked the walk and thanks to the couple of rough tracks can claim some proper bushwalking experience. There was one “no show” who has not contacted me, but one other person sent me an email at 11.23pm the night before the walk to say “i won’t be coming to the hike tomorrow. I hope you all have a good time”; and gave no reason. Of course I didn’t see it until 7am in the morning (have to get an early night if leading a walk the next day). His name did ring a bell and I checked the people who came to my Newcastle walk of 19/10 last year and found he had also pulled out of that walk at 10.14pm the previous night. Withdrawing that late does not give anyone a chance on a wait list to be invited to come. Not good enough!
Also, I have included a consolation prize to those who went to Katoomba on Elias’s walk and got a cloudy sky which obscured the meteor shower. The last two photos are of the special rare cluster of the planets Mercury, Saturn and Mars in the sky about an hour before sunrise (about 5.15am) which I took on 20th April. I have labelled the planets and you might note that Mars has a slightly red tinge.
Bruce Stafford.
