This is the sixth in a series of caches related to the history of the South Coast of Western Australia.
The location can be accessed from a gravel road, along a vehicle track which is blocked by a gate to prevent vehicle use by the public. There is a small area to park in front of the gate into the City Reserve (don’t block the gate). From the gate, it is about 450 metres to the cache along a sandy vehicle track. The vehicle track crosses the Bibulmun Track about 120 metres from the gate.
The cache is located on a headland overlooking Port Harding and Migo Island. The beach below is known by the locals as ‘Hartmans Beach’. In the late 1930s, Howard Hartman, a fisherman from Albany, started mooring his boat in the sheltered waters, and for many years, fished along the south coast as far as Point Hillier.
However, one hundred years earlier, in March 1838, a British warship, HMS Pelorus, visited Albany, and a group of sailors carried out a survey of Torbay. The survey was supervised by Charles Forsyth,the first mate of the Pelorus, who named the sheltered waters between the beach and Migo Island as Port Harding after Francis Harding, the Captain of the Pelorus.