New Quay

Contacts
Harbour Master 01545 560368 Mob 07773 315799
New Quay Yacht Club 01545 560516

Please note that you are reading the notes on New Quay (Wales) not Newquay (Cornwall)

New Quay Bay is situated just over 8 miles North of Aberporth and about 4 miles South of Aberaeron on the Cardigan Bay coast. It is well sheltered from the prevailing South West winds but open to anything from the Northern quadrant. During the summer the sheltered part of the bay opposite the town is full of yachts and pleasure boats moored on four point moorings to ground chains on the drying sand of the harbour with further swinging moorings outside that. To lie here in shelter you need to be able to take the ground; the pier itself is reserved for the few fishing boats remaining from what used to be a very healthy fishing fleet.

The first pier to be built here was the small pier and slip to the SE of the main pier. It was built by the local famers at the end of the seventeenth century to service a small import/export industry along with an expanding fishing fleet. During the eighteenth century a ship building industry of reasonable importance built up as it did in most of the small harbours on this coast but with the advent of steam and steel the wooden sailing vessels here could not compete and the industry died out but it should be noted that they till had a wooden sailing lifeboat here until 1948.

It was during this ship building phase that the main pier was built in the early Victorian times. The town started to attract visitors in the last half of Victoria's reign and that opportunity was not lost on the local Welsh people who, since then, have reinvented the town as an attractive visitor destination. (One wonders how many people turned up here when they thought they were going to Cornwall –there must be some interesting tales knocking around somewhere?)

So, what we have now is the main pier which extends the shelter provided by New Quay Head and has been further increased by the groyne extending for fifty yards south eastwards from the pier (marked by a pole with a triangular starboard hand top mark) and a very small pier which is used by a few small angling boats and has at its root the Life Boat station housing a Mersey Class Life Boat.