The small island at the end of our beach has given its name to the whole suburb. Here is the story of the bay in a few stops — from a fishing pool and a pā to a farm called Rock Island, a post office that needed a new name, and a sailing club that started in a tent.
Māori settlement of the Auckland region began around the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The name Waiake — an eternal spring — is understood to refer to a pool upstream on Deep Creek, the stream that meets the sea behind our beach, known as a fishing place.
The headland beside the Tor is a known pā site. A tradition tells of Moeroa, a chief's daughter, who sat on the cliffs of the Tor weaving mats until one day the cliff gave way; the island was tapu thereafter. You can walk out to it at low tide today.
After the Crown purchase of 1841 and a spell of unsuccessful coal prospecting by John Logan Campbell in the 1860s, a British farmer named Long bought some 200 acres here around 1880 and called his farm Rock Island — and this beach Rock Isle Beach.
The first wharf went up around 1880 and ferries stayed the main way in and out until the 1920s. St Mary by the Sea, an Anglican church, followed in 1886, and two years later the district's first school opened inside it.
Just north at Long Bay, George Vaughan built his homestead in 1863 and the family farmed the land for a century before it became a regional park in 1965. The homestead is now cared for by the Torbay Historical Society.
Sections here were first sold in 1915 as the Deep Creek Estate, and by the early 1930s that was the district's name. In 1933 the post office was renamed Torbay to end confusion with other places called Deep Creek and Oneroa — a name, it is said, chosen because the Tor recalled Torbay in Devon.
Torbay Boating Club was formed in 1959 and ran its first races from a tent, signalling starts with balls on the beach where the children's swings now stand. It merged with the much older Taiotea Boating Club of Browns Bay in the 1960s, and its 2016 clubhouse hosted the Youth Sailing World Championships that year.
The club's own history →
Your hosts are happy to assist with arranging bookings for these experiences — just ask.
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