Original old girls cruising the Myall River and Port Stephens, with awards in tow.

Kerrie Jeffreys had already seen a fair bit of the world before three old timber ferries stopped her in her tracks. She fell for them properly, wrote out a cheque, and spent the next two years restoring what everyone around here now just calls “the old girls” back to their former glory.

That’s the story behind The Original Tea Gardens Ferry, and it’s also, as it turns out, the story behind a growing shelf of trophies.

The latest arrived at the 2026 MidCoast Business Awards, Best Visitor Experience in the Tourism Business category. It’s not the first, either, the fleet took out Business of the Year at the 2024 Port Stephens Examiner Business Awards, and more recently found itself a finalist in the Australian Small Business Awards.

For a business built on three heritage vessels and a whole lot of elbow grease, that’s a serious run of recognition, and locals reckon it’s well overdue.

The fleet itself has history worth knowing. MV Tea Gardens was built in 1944 for the RAAF’s marine division, ferrying munitions to Catalina flying boats during the war. MV Jesse started life in 1955 on Lakes Entrance in Victoria under the name Bluebird.

Between them and their sister vessel, these boats have covered more water and more decades than most of us will manage in a lifetime, and now they spend their days carrying thousands of passengers a year across Port Stephens and up the Myall River instead.

That sense of story runs through everything Kerrie and her crew do. The newest addition is the Lost Landscapes Myall River Discovery Cruise, departing Tea Gardens and heading further upriver into landscapes and local stories most visitors never get to see.

The Local Legends and Lost Stories Cruise does something similar closer to town, while a rotating calendar of seasonal cruises out of Nelson Bay and Tea Gardens covers everything from high teas to community charters.

If you’re after something simpler, the two hour Arvo Cruise departs Tea Gardens at 2.30pm and gets you back by 4.30pm, BYO drinks and snacks encouraged, salty breeze included at no extra cost. Keep an eye on the water too, the bay’s resident dolphins have a habit of turning up uninvited and stealing the show.

Congratulations to Kerrie and the whole crew, another trophy for a business that was never really about the trophies in the first place.

Cruises depart Tea Gardens and Nelson Bay daily. Book directly:  theoriginalteagardensferry.com.au