In 1995 a section of the national park here was handed back to its traditional owners; two years later, in 1997, they gave it a name from the Dhurga language: Booderee, often translated as bay of plenty, or plenty of fish. The park is now jointly managed by the Wreck Bay Aboriginal Community and the Commonwealth, and the name fits. Dolphins and seals are routine sights in the bay. A colony of little penguins, the world's smallest, nests along its shores. Each year humpback whales detour into the sheltered water to rest during both legs of their long migration, and a mother and calf paused in the calm is among the great sights of the southern coast. Inside the park, kangaroos graze the campgrounds at Green Patch and rainbow lorikeets land on outstretched hands.

Murrays Beach, near the mouth of the bay, is prized today for its isolation and its penguins. It came astonishingly close to a very different fate. In the late 1960s the Commonwealth selected this exact stretch of coast for Australia's first nuclear power station, and preliminary site works actually began before the project was shelved in the early 1970s. Stand on that quiet white crescent now, with the bush running down to clear water and seabirds wheeling overhead, and the near-miss feels almost unbelievable. The same logic of strategic isolation that nearly brought a reactor here is why the Royal Australian Navy has long held a presence in the bay. HMAS Creswell, the navy's officer training college, sits on the western shore, and the water directly in front of it stays closed to the public.

Huskisson is the bay's largest town, and for most of the year it drowses like the small fishing village it once was. Then summer arrives and short-term visitors swell it to roughly three times its winter size. Locals call it Husky. Its working wharf on Owen Street is the launching point for the dive boats and the whale-watching cruises, and its two beaches frame the town: one in front of the pub, the other tucked between the caravan parks. A few kilometres south, Vincentia is the holiday-home capital of the coast, its cottages booked out so reliably that the same families return to the same houses year after year, claiming next summer's stay before this one has ended. If you want a bed here over Christmas, you start thinking about it a year ahead.

The bay rewards anyone willing to look past the famous sand. North of Huskisson, the Beecroft Peninsula is an active military range that opens to the public when firing stops, and at its tip stand the near-vertical cliffs of Point Perpendicular, dropping sheer into the sea. Currarong, in the bay's north, styles itself the surf capital of the area. Within Booderee, Caves Beach draws surfers, while Summercloud Bay holds a lagoon of startling blue where stingrays glide over the shallows and the rock walls invite slow exploration. Jervis Bay Marine Park stretches across 100 kilometres of coast and water, from Kinghorn Point in the north to Sussex Inlet in the south, a protected sweep that takes in everything from the open ocean swell to the bay's mirror-calm inlets.