About
Toondah Harbour at a glance
Toondah Harbour is a harbour location at Cleveland in Moreton Bay, Queensland. The name and supplied location records indicate a marine harbour facility in the Cleveland / Moreton Bay area; no website or detailed service listing was supplied in the available records.
Service area: Cleveland, Moreton Bay, QLD
- Marina type
- government/transport wharf-marina
- Operator
- Redland City Council / SeaLink
- Region
- Moreton Bay
- Water body
- Moreton Bay
Facilities and services
- boat ramp
- vehicle ferry terminal
- passenger ferry terminal
- ferry swing basin
- bus interchange
- ~1000-bay carpark
- GJ Walter Park picnic/BBQ facilities
- trailer parking
Useful for sailors looking for
- Dry storage or hardstand
About Toondah Harbour
Toondah Harbour at Cleveland is less a marina than Moreton Bay's busiest small working harbour, the mainland terminal for every ferry running to North Stradbroke Island, known as Minjerribah. From first light, SeaLink vehicle ferries load cars, trucks and campers for the 45-minute run to Dunwich while passenger catamarans from SeaLink and the Stradbroke Flyer shuttle commuters and day-trippers across in about 25 minutes. Between movements, trailer boats launch from the harbour's ramp and locals walk the foreshore of GJ Walter Park, a shaded waterfront reserve that wraps the harbour's northern edge. The harbour is operated within Redland City Council's orbit and sits at the end of Middle Street, with Cleveland's shops and train station close behind. For more than a decade Toondah has also been Queensland's most argued-about redevelopment site. The harbour lies inside a Priority Development Area whose development scheme maps a staged transformation: consolidated ferry terminals, new foreshore parklands and a public plaza, mixed-use buildings, land reclamation and a recreational marina designed to grow in stages to as many as 400 berths, served by a new northern channel for recreational boats. An earlier private-sector proposal collapsed amid environmental opposition in 2022, and the scheme's future remains politically charged. For the visiting boatie today, though, Toondah is what it has long been: a practical launching and ferry point into southern Moreton Bay, valued for utility rather than amenity. The name comes from a Quandamooka word, and the harbour has served as the island link since the nineteenth century, first for shipping and oyster leases, then for the barge and ferry trades that built modern Straddie.
Marina facilities
Current boating services are those of a public harbour rather than a marina. The trailer-boat ramp gives access to southern Moreton Bay, backed by a large harbour carpark off Emmett Drive with roughly a thousand bays, which nonetheless fills before peak ferry departures; parking is patrolled and wrongly parked vehicles in trailer bays attract fines, so arrive early. There are no wet berths, no moorings, no fuel berth, no pump-out and no chandlery on the water; fuel and marine supplies come from Cleveland's service stations and marine retailers a short drive away. The ferry infrastructure dominates: separate terminals for the SeaLink vehicle ferries and the passenger services, vehicle queuing and holding areas, a ferry swing basin in the harbour and bus connections linking the terminals with Cleveland station, which has trains to Brisbane. GJ Walter Park provides toilets, picnic and barbecue facilities and a boat-watching foreshore. Under the PDA development scheme, future stages would rationalise ferry queuing, extend the swing basin, straighten Fison Channel gradually, and build a marina precinct north of the ferry terminals with boating service facilities such as fuel, water, toilets, laundry and sewage pump-out where practicable, plus breakwater protection and a new recreational channel. None of that is built yet, and anyone reading berth availability online should check dates carefully; as of now the only overnight option for a visiting boat is an anchorage or a berth elsewhere in the bay, at Raby Bay, Manly or across at Dunwich. The council also maintains the foreshore seawall and dinghy landing used by island residents, and charter and hire operators run from the precinct.
Local sailing knowledge
Navigation into Toondah is via Fison Channel, a marked, dredged track through the broad shallow banks of southern Moreton Bay; depths outside the leads are thin, so stick to the channel, especially at low tide, and keep well clear of the vehicle ferries that swing in the basin on a tight schedule. The bay here is classic Moreton Bay boating: Peel Island's Horseshoe Bay lies a few miles north-east as the local lunch anchorage, the Cassowary Coast is far away but Goat Island and the Redcliffe Peninsula frame the horizon, and the run across to Dunwich takes a private boat well under an hour in settled weather. South-easterlies can chop the bay up badly in the afternoon, and westerlies flatten it; summer nor'-easters build their own sea. Stradbroke Island itself is the drawcard, with Amity Point's anchorage and the Jumpinpin bar for the adventurous further south. Ashore, Cleveland offers full provisioning within a kilometre of the ramp, Raby Bay's restaurants sit one headland south, and the train from Brisbane Central reaches Cleveland station in about an hour, handy for crew arriving without a car. Parking fines at the harbour are a local legend among Straddie regulars; read the signs. The Quandamooka people are the traditional owners of these waters, and the harbour sits within the Moreton Bay Ramsar wetlands, which is exactly why the redevelopment debate has run so long and so hot. Cleveland Point, just north of the harbour, has the historic lighthouse and a boat-friendly foreshore reserve, and the bay's green zones around Peel and the bay islands are closely policed, so check marine park maps before dropping a line.