Stockton Beach is a 32km strip of beach and sand dunes stretching out just behind Newcastle nearly all the way up to Nelson Bay. We have often heard of it before especially in conjunction with 4WD sand and dune drive courses, considered doing one there ourselves. And as it turned out we’ve even been there on the beach near Anna Bay with Imelda, Teena, Jacky and the gang 4 years ago.

One of Markus’ colleagues kept asking him, if we didn’t want to go up there with him and do some 4WDing. So last weekend we finally got our act together and drove up. The weather was perfect, sunny, warm and clear blue skies.

We were supposed to meet Piotr on Sunday but decided to go up already on Saturday and camp out on the beach . Markus brought his fishing rod and brand new metal lure to pratice casting from the shore. A gentle warm breeze was blowing and we had the most amazing sunset and sunrise on the next morning.

We stayed the night at the upper half closer to Anna Bay and drove down along the beach on Sunday morning to meet with Piotr and his friends. The lower part was a lot busier and full of sand buggies. The sand on the beach was pretty churned up and made driving not too pleasant. Most of the time we followed Piotrs lead well behind the beach within the dunes where the sand was still fairly soft but at least not as uneven. Piotr practised snatching out other peoples car. And Martina had a major hysteric breakdown when the path led more or less down a very high and steep dune face forcing Markus to drive around and watch the others go over and down the dune. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts by the other drivers to go up the dune again, we made our way further up first to see the old tank traps, stop for lunch and then visit Tin City before leaving the beach at Anna Bay again.

The full gallery can be found here