Two rivers flow into Hebe Haven: the Ho Chung River from the west and the Tai Chung River from the northwest. Tides and river currents deposit sediment in the haven's sheltered corners, shaping small beaches and alleviating the bottom — though the tidal range here is modest and the currents are gentle. A cluster of smaller streams enters from the northern edge. One of them runs through a small mangrove area near Pak Sha Wan village, and this mangrove patch has a specific reputation: the black-capped kingfisher is regularly sighted here, making it one of the better places in Hong Kong to observe a bird that is rarely easy to find. The area is small and not especially scenic, accessible at high tide only by dinghy, but birders who know about it seek it out. That kind of specificity — the hyper-local knowledge that rewards those who look closely — is characteristic of the Sai Kung coast.

A ring of villages surrounds Hebe Haven, each with its own character and its own long history. Au Tsai Tsuen, Che Keng Tuk, Heung Chung, Ho Chung New Village, Kau Sai San Tsuen, Luk Mei Tsuen, Nam Wai, Pak Sha Wan, Pak Wai, Ta Ho Tun Ha Wai, Ta Ho Tun Sheung Wai, Tsiu Hang, Tsiu Hang Hau, Wo Mei — the list reads like a cadastral map of traditional Cantonese settlement. Many of these villages trace their origins to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Hakka and Punti families established communities along Hong Kong's rural coastlines. Nam Wai, on the eastern shore, holds a Tin Hau Temple that local fishing communities have maintained for generations, dedicated to the goddess of the sea. The marine orientation of these villages was not incidental: fish, boats, and the rhythms of the tidal calendar shaped life here long before Sai Kung became a weekend destination for city-dwellers.

Hebe Haven is above all a yachting harbor, and has been since British colonial society took an interest in the peninsula's natural anchorages. The Shelter Cove Yacht Club, affiliated with the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, operates here, as does the independent Hebe Haven Yacht Club. Numerous moorings are distributed across the haven's sheltered waters, with a clearly marked navigational channel — the marks are not lit at night, worth noting for anyone approaching after dark. Sea Scouting has a presence here too. On weekends, the harbor fills with boats at all stages of preparation and return: sails coming down, dinghies ferrying crews ashore, the particular social atmosphere of a sailing community where everyone is either arriving or departing or talking about both. The Marina Cove residential estate, built along the haven's shore, brings a more permanent residential population to what was once a working coastal landscape.

What makes Hebe Haven worth noting is how it holds two versions of Hong Kong in close proximity. On the water, the yacht clubs and their gleaming hulls represent the territory at its most internationally minded — a sailing culture rooted in colonial British leisure and maintained by a cosmopolitan community with deep money and a shared attachment to wind and tide. On the shore, the old villages maintain their own continuity: temple festivals, clan ties, farming plots, fishing boats pulled up on the beach. The Pier Hotel on the Pak Sha Wan waterfront, a 40-room property that opened in September 2018 and owned by the family of Francis Choi Chee-ming, captures the more recent layer — a boutique hotel with a single Japanese restaurant, inserting Sai Kung's particular brand of serene luxury into a harbor that has always been, at its core, about finding shelter from the open sea.