Sailing from Bruny to Maria (via the Tasman Peninsula)
We did an overnight sail from Bruny Island, crossing Storm Bay. My night watch was particularly good. Almost as soon As I went out to the helm, I was joined by a big pod of perhaps twenty dolphins. They streaked through the bioluminescence like so many heat-seeking missiles heading for a warm spot under the trampoline. They followed us for hours, peeling off and circling back. The glow from their wakes actually made their underwater movements easier to track than in the daytime.
That would have been great in itself, but I also got to finally, FINALLY get an unmistakable view of the Aurora Australis. So far, every time the Southern Lights have been active and we have been where we actually have a chance of seeing them, it has been cloudy or we have been too close to a city. We were headed northbound again, so our chances would only decrease from here. I so wanted to be able to see the ‘other’, southern ones, too. I don’t intend to be annoying at parties, but it’s nice to know I could be.
When the morning twilight ended all of that fun, we had a few minutes, then passed by Tasman Island at sunrise. The Dennison Canal route is shorter, but the dramatic scenery going the long way around is just the kind of stuff sailing dreams are made of. We passed way under the cliffs of the island and even further under the cliffs of Cape Pillar before passing the columns at Cape Huay, this time with no tightrope walker in evidence, before making for Riedle Bay on Maria Island.
Maria is like a mini Bruny in that it is two large land masses connected by a skinny isthmus. Riedle Bay is the eastern compliment to Shoal Bay/Chinaman’s Bay on the opposite, western side. It is there that we had anchored on the way south. Being on the exposed side of the island makes Riedle deeper, subject to more swell and less populated than Chinaman’s Bay. We tucked in to the calmest corner and dropped anchor next to a lone commercial fishing boat.
The sky was clear again (and cold!), with no artificial lights. The aurora was still going and was even stronger than the night before, even sporting a few well-defined curtains shimmering away {Maryanne: Normally in Tasmania the aurora is only seen using a camara with a long exposure, so it was extra special to see a glimpse of it with the naked eye; I can only imagine how it special it might have looked if long-exposures would work from a moving boat}.
Since we had last walked north of the isthmus (Point Lesueur), this time we decided to take the trail south to Haunted Bay. The walk over the island starts off with a grade so shallow that is almost unnoticeable. It peaks way on the other side and then plunges steeply back down to the water. There’s little hint of what’s to come until the end, then it emerges into a world of sculpted rock covered in bright orange lichen that contrasts the deep blue water below. We scrambled left and right (and up and down), amazed at the perfect photogenic positioning of each new vista. The start of the walk back was tough, but it was so worth it.
Stunning Haunted Bay
Back at the isthmus, we realized our mileage (kilometerage?) for the day was only in the teens, so we decided to do tomorrow’s trail now and headed to the end of the other southern trail on to Robey’s Farm. There, we met another American, another Brit and some German guy, who were on a day trip all of the way from the other side of Maria Island at Darlington. We told them Haunted Bay was really cool, then realized they didn’t have enough daylight left to go there if they were still going to make it to their ferry. Oops!
Robey's Farm and some wildlife along the trails
A peak at Shoal Bay (across the isthmus)
And the wilder Riedle Bay
We had a lazy day aboard and then moved the boat across to the North side of Riedle Bay at Whaler’s Cove. There, we found a deep spot just big enough for our swing and dropped the anchor. Instead of sand and surf, Whaler’s is surrounded by bright orange rock formations like a smaller version of Haunted Bay. There are no hiking trails here, so Maryanne pumped up the new kayak and we headed out in that. There are lots of cool nooks and crannies, but the best of them was the big rock window eroded through one of the adjacent islets. I dropped Maryanne off and she scrambled around taking pictures of me in the kayak while I took pictures of her on the rocks.
We also did a short hike up the riverbed that feeds into Whaler’s Cove. It petered out long before we were able to consider our walk exercise, but it was a pretty diversion from paddling. Our big find there was a meter-long snake sitting on a rock on the other side of a downed tree we were trying to traverse.
Exploring around Whalers' Cove
Tasmania has three species of snake. Two are venomous, the other is not not venomous. That last one is the white-lipped snake. Ours looked like that one, except that I got a pretty good, long look at its face and didn’t see the telltale white lips, so it may have been one of the other two. The white-lipped snake is a forty-five-minute snake, which is almost double the amount of time you would have to make your peace if you were bitten by one of the other two.
We’ve heard they don’t really want anything to do with us, so we tried being loud and obvious. It was completely unbothered by this and after a long enough pause to let us know so, it slowly slithered right at me (for some reason, I was in front). This did not worry me, since I assumed it was just headed for the cover of the tangle of branches on the opposite side of the intervening log from us.
What was a little unnerving was when it emerged from the tangle to escape up the bank. It was going away from us, so we were in no danger, but it just appeared silently and slid up the log. There was no warning, no rustling, just a nice-looking place to step one second and a meter-long deadly snake the next. That’s when we realized they could be anywhere. They could be everywhere! Every rock, leaf and twig was the object of much suspicion on the way back to the kayak.
In the morning, we were up early for the short sail to Maria Island’s main harbor at Darlington. After a few tacks to make it out of Riedle Bay, we sailed the rest of the way on a beam reach. We were close enough to enjoy detailed views of the island’s amazing geography, which dates all of the way back to when it was a polar part of Gondwanaland. Several eroded sections of the multi-colored sandstone opened up into big caves where crashing waves exploded into spray, sending a boom that arrived to our ears half a second later. We finished that leg with a close pass under the Fossil Cliffs. They are not as impressive as the ones behind us, but those are not accessible on foot. These were topped by brightly colored specks who would occasionally take pictures of us as we sailed below.
Darlington is not a town there, per se, but instead a park ranger’s office, a campground and bare bones backpacker accommodation in the old convict cells. The ferry from Triabunna lands there and as such, it is the starting point for most who explore the island. {Maryanne: I had been expecitedly expecting a nice tea-shop in the grounds, since the maps clearly showed a building called "The Coffee Palace", however when we arrived we found a it was a museum dedicated to feeding of the past visitors. You could even sit at tables piled with food from different eras of the island... So close!}.
We had originally planned our arrival day to be a sailing day, with the next day set aside for hiking, but a closer study of the tide chart and the weather revealed that it would be better for us to split up our three planned hikes into two days.
Our first was a hike across the grassy, rolling hills back to Fossil Cliffs. There, we got a closer look at what we had sailed by earlier. Now we were two of the picture-taking specks. About 290 million years ago, a mass extinction event caused many of the bivalves (clams, scallops and such) to fall to the seabed, where they eventually became fossilized for posterity. There were some places where almost the entire stone layer was made up of petrified shells. It’s not as exciting as finding big dinosaur bones, but it is still an important data point for understanding the region’s past.
Fossil Cliffs
Wombats
We doubled up our Fossil Cliffs loop hike with another up to Darlington’s water source, a reservoir built by convicts, then it was a nice meander through forest back to Darlington. Happy that our day’s mileage had reached the respectable range, we were heading back to the beach when we spotted some wombats.
Every time I see one, I can’t get over how impossibly cute they are. Their scientific name, vombatus ursinus gives a clue to this. Ursidae is the family bears occupy. Bears are, of course, killing machines, but on the surface, they look cute and fluffy. That’s why Teddy Roosevelt’s stuffed bears became ubiquitous children’s cuddle toys, the Teddy Bear. Wombats are little, vegetarian, Teddy Bear-sized bears that spend their days going around being adorable.
The one’s we found seemed pretty accustomed to humans and would basically go on with their grazing without any regard to us, so long as we kept low and more than arm’s length away. Thus, our short trip to the dinghy got waylaid by a couple of happy hours of sitting next to them on the grass while they slowly made their way by, keeping it trimmed to an even length.
At the next morning’s low tide, we set off to do the relatively short loop to the Painted Cliffs, a particularly nice section of sandstone most easily accessed at low water. We took the long way there via the ruins of the Oast House, where hops were dried when it was a farm. The best part of that trail came a little further on where we found lots of cute little Padrmelons surprised by the day’s first humans. That’s the real unsung attraction of that seldom-used trail. I decided they should call that section the Pademelon Paddock.
Painted Cliffs
We saw no cute wombats on the way home that morning, but we did encounter a family with a little girl about three years old who boasted to Maryanne that her sandwich was Vegemite. Holy Hell! You can’t do that to a kid! I’m a grown man and I’m traumatized by just the smell of the stuff.
General views from our time exploring the trails around Darlington
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