Lime Bay

[Kyle]After a bit of a rinse, we woke to a morning of perfect calm. That was on the outside. On the inside, we were a little jittery. We had been getting alerts all night about the ginormous Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano eruption in Tonga. We had yet to hear how the Tongans and other surrounding nations had fared (it looked so devastating), it was so powerful that tsunami warnings were in effect for the entire Australian east coast, including Tasmania. The warnings even went so far as to mention Norfolk Bay specifically, of which our anchorage at Eaglehawk Neck was a part. Over the VHF radio, mariners were advised to head offshore into deep water or otherwise to secure their vessels and get away from the water.

Uh, oh. We didn’t have anywhere ashore to go, apart from out into the rain. The bad news was that our route to deep water was very long and our exit from Eaglehawk neck was blocked by shallows at low tide. That was also the good news. Any tsunami wave would have to make several ninety-degree turns to get to our part of Tasmania. We were essentially inside the end of a giant spiral breakwater (we hoped).

As we emerged at high tide the next morning, we could see no evidence whatsoever that it the depth was or had been unusually high. We lifted anchor and headed out from Eaglehawk bay.

I had done a few engine and sail repairs during our stay. The calm conditions gave the engines a good run and let us raise the sails slowly and incrementally to check that everything was looking the way it was supposed to.

During the calm journey around the Tasman Peninsula we spotted plenty of seals loafing around

Once the sails were up, we shut down the engines. Ah. It was marvelous! We only had one to three knots of true wind, our boat speed wasn’t even enough to register on our through-the-water speed transducer. The great thing was that Norfolk Bay was completely flat. Without any waves to swing the mast around, the sails didn’t slat or empty. We were slow, steady and comfortable. In a few hours, we had moved ten miles and it was once again time to start the now-cold engines for our arrival into Lime Bay.

The next morning was beautiful and clear, it seemed reasonable to think we were free of any tsunami warnings for now, so we were up early with a plan of going ashore and walking every trail on the end of the peninsula.

A beautiful day, and a beautiful place for a walk.

We started by heading east to the Monk Bay viewpoint, passing over the spine of the peninsula. We disturbed a couple of kangaroos and a wallaby, but otherwise the forest was pretty quiet. Then we hiked west to the other side at Lagoon Beach.

The sand dunes of Lagoon Beach

That amazing mud-ball chimney is built by an insect know as a spider-wasp. I've never seen one before, it's always so wonderful to find something novel on a walk - not that this means we don't also enjoy the spectacular views.

The land here is much flatter and grassier. It seemed like perfect wombat territory. We kept seeing lots of tracks and scat, but never spotted any animals. We found a pademelon, a few more kangaroos and a very fluffy Bennet’s Wallaby. Mostly, we encountered plenty of the local March Flies. Maryanne suffered one bite, but the rest all paid for landing on us with an early demise. Sorry, Buddhists.

It was low tide when we finally got back to the dinghy. Even though I had anchored it waist-deep, it was now resting on the bottom in 2cm of water. We had to drag it halfway to Begonia before we could board it without bottoming it out. Lime Bay would be a great place to teach kids to swim. If you can still see ‘em from the beach, they’re not in over their heads.