St Helens

[Kyle]At Bryans Corner, in the afternoon, at about the time the onshore chop was starting to get really annoying, we upped anchor and headed north as the last straggler in the crowd that had all left by dawn.

A pretty sunset as we waited for the right weather anchored to move on from Bryans Corner

It was actually a pretty nice sail. Once we were sufficiently offshore, we changed from reaching under working sail to running under the spinnaker. Apart from a few lumpy areas where the currents roughed up the surface, it was smooth and pleasant downwind sailing. It was even clear enough to get one last look at the southern lights before clouds and decreasing latitude would hide them from us.

The entrance to St Helen’s is shallow and dangerous in anything but offshore (south through northwest) winds. I called St Helen’s Marine Rescue as soon as they opened and the friendly guy there said the bar conditions were the calmest he’d seen in a long time. There was only small surf on the edges of a wide swath of flat water in the channel. When I told him our draft, he said there would be no reason for us to wait several hours for the tide to come up; we could go in now.

Great! The flood had us zinging the eight miles to the town center. There, we found the public pier to be completely full, so we retreated to the edge of the adjacent mooring field. We found a spot in only 1.3 meters at low tide and dropped anchor.

The weather was supposed to be heavy rain the next afternoon, Maryanne had said that she wanted to do some provisioning and laundry, so I was up in the dark preparing to go ashore as soon as it was light out so we could get to the stores when they opened. When it came time for her to stir, she took one look outside at the rapidly approaching gloom and decided to put all of that stuff off until tomorrow, when it has all passed.

Begonia anchored off the town of St Helens

That morning was much brighter. We both practically leapt into the dinghy to go ashore. We decided to skip the little laundry we needed to do and save loading the backpack with provisions until we were on our way home. In the meantime, we thought we would pop into a café for a pre-walk snack. This quickly morphed into a search for toast.

Like ice cream, toast is one of those things that we just don’t get aboard. Before anyone writes in, we know that you can get special racks to turn a gas stove into a camping toaster. We have tried them and never got satisfactory results even remotely similar to what a $5 electric toaster does. Thus, toast has become a special shore treat.

Toast is actually hard to find. We found lots of places that offered to toast a muffin or a sandwich, but we got apologies when we asked if we could dispense with the ingredients and just get a toasted air sandwich. “No. Sorry, Love. They’re all pre-made.”

After much asking around at different places, we were finally told to try Major Munchies. Major Munchies is not a café, but kind of a takeaway fish and chip/burger counter with a couple of basic tables by the soda machine. When Maryanne asked if they had toast on the menu, They said that they didn’t, but that they served toast with breakfast. Maryanne asked me if I wanted another whole breakfast.

“Well, I guess I could.” I turned to them, “What sorts of things do you have for breakfast?”

“Right! One breakfast coming up!”

My mistake. Instead of having a Breakfast Menu, their menu had a single item in that category called, simply, ‘Breakfast’. No other description. Well, this should be interesting. I was trying to remember if I had heard anything about traditional Aussie or Tassie breakfasts including anything like tripe or sheep liver.

It did not. It was a basic fry-up: eggs, ham and bakedbeans served over toast. While they were making this for me, we met the owners, John and Shelly. They were each super friendly. While John helped us figure out what was worth seeing in the area, Shelly cooked my breakfast and then brought it out with a special overflow plate of toast for Maryanne. We talked for a bit more (they are SO nice!). When Shelly noticed Maryanne finishing her last slice of toast, she dashed back into the kitchen to produce a refill for her. She seemed to really enjoy Maryanne’s joy at such a simple thing.

We strolled around the foreshore walks, and visited the museum in St Helens
The giant egg is a Time Capsule created in 2006 (to be opened in 2026)

Our subsequent forays through St Helen’s between waterfront strolls, we met lots of other really nice people, all of whom just couldn’t do enough for us two weary vagabonds. Friendliness seems to be some sort of local characteristic. Come to think of it, all of Tasmania is like that, but the people in St Helen’s even stand out then.