Mt. Wellington

We've moved from the dock at the yacht club out to a mooring.  This is the view we wake up with - the southern suburbs of Hobart, with Mt. Wellington behind.

Today Nick, one of our Hobart doppelgangers, showed us around up on Mt. Wellington. Nick and Marls are our dopplegangers because they just crossed the Pacific on a Crealock 37, they are expecting their first child a week before Alisa is due, and Marls is a marine biologist. We think they are the good kind of dopplegangers, though, not the bad.

We walked up to the Organ Pipes, the dolerite cliffs at the top of Wellington.  The trail started as a steep scramble, which Elias did much of under his own power.  "I've never been rock climbing before!" he said as this picture was taken.

Elias enjoying the fruit of his efforts.  We had brought along the climbing gear, and while Alisa and E. had a hike and a play in a spring and a snack, Nick kindly hauled me up a two-pitch climb called Blue Meridan.  I was glad that Alisa and Elias weren't watching from below, as I grovelled my way up both pitches, and Alisa would have had to answer endless questions along the lines of, "Why is Daddy falling?"

As far as I can recall, this was my first climb since the boreal spring of 2000!  Time was when mountain climbing was mostly all I wanted to do, but now I mostly want to do other things.  Great fun to get out, though, and great to jump right onto a two-pitch climb.  And now, I don't have to worry about crossing rock climbing off the must-do list before we leave Tasmania.

Tasmania!

Well, we seem to have landed on our feet in Tasmania.  After finishing up the cruise down the east coast of the island (some pictures below), we landed in Hobart last Sunday.  Within days we had concluded that the people of this place are just as wonderful and friendly as you would expect from the fantastic physical setting of the island.

Constitution Dock, right in the center of town, where we had expected to stay, has recently instituted a policy of discouraging liveaboards, and turned us away.  Since Alisa had a prenatal appointment the next morning, we decided to splurge on a week at the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania (at $190 a week, a bit of a splurge!).  This gave us a base for getting to her appointment, and also for finding our feet in this new town, and it also turned out to be a great place to meet friendly local sailors and to catch up with members of the long-distance cruising fraternity who used to collect at Constitution Dock.

I think the best measure of how warm our welcome to Hobart has been is that in our first week here, we either had new friends aboard for dinner or went to someone's house for a barbie five of the seven nights.  A variety of people have gone out of their way to make us feel welcome here, but I think that the highest marks for hospitality must go to Mike and Ingfried, who met us briefly on Maria Island, where they were camping with their two girls.  They told us to ring them when we got to Hobart, and when we did, they had us over for a barbie, where they served muttonbird, or short-tailed shearwater, which is a real treat for any Alaskan seabird biologist.  It's the full-grown but not-yet-out-of-the-nest chicks that are eaten, and it appears that you have to be well connected in Tassie to get a hold of muttonbird.  Mike and Ingfried also introduced us to a variety of their friends and relations, who all turned out to be interesting people, and then at the end of the night Mike had everyone write down their contact info for us so that we could kick-start the building of our own Tassie community.  And all of this after a few minutes' aquaintanceship on Maria.  Very nice, of course, and the night also gave us a great answer for the inevitable ice-breaking question that we get from other locals.  "So what have you done in Tassie so far?" people ask, and they invariably love it when we answer, "We've eaten muttonbird!"

We've still been here only a week, and are still looking for a car, though we have a couple good leads, and we also have a good lead for a five-month housesit that would get us through the birth of crewmember #4.  Alisa likes the birthing center at the hospital, I've been putting out feelers in the local marine biology community to get to know some of my local professional peers, and Hobart generally feels like it will be a good place for us to live for a year or so. 

Here are some pics from the second half of our cruise along the east coast of Tasmania, which already seems a lifetime ago, though it was only a week.

Shouten Island in the morning light.

Shy albatross.

Canoe Bay, where we anchored behind a wreck.

The walking track from Canoe Bay.

Motoring between Tasman Island and Cape Pillar.

Motoring up Storm Bay to Hobart, we had a great display of leaping Pacific offshore bottlenose dolphins.

Darn autofocus!

The end.

Bass Strait

We spent our last day on the Australian mainland flushing saltwater out of the outboard and rinsing the sand out of our clothes.  We recuperated that night with a feast of local mussels kindly passed along to us by the crew of Ice Dancer, another Alaskan boat that was waiting to make the crossing to Tasmania.

We began the crossing of Bass Strait, the body of water between the mainland and Tasmania, with 20 hours of motoring, most of it into a light southerly wind and a confused swell.  Since, two years into this adventure, we still do not have a working autopilot, this was a dreary experience in constant hand-steering.  Things were made worse by the fact that Alisa and I both turned green with the motion.  Elias, as always, was completely unaffected.

The next morning a northeast breeze came up, which meant that the wind was behind us, and we were soon flying along under jib and main with the windvane steering.  But the swell was still confused, and Alisa wasn't feeling great.  We were both tired, and considered spending a night in an anchorage off one of the islands scattered off the northeast corner of Tassie.  But even the most optimistic reading of our average speed showed us falling short of the closest anchorage by nightfall.  So we kept going, consoling ourselves with the idea that we had a great sailing wind.

The next day was gray, as you would expect for the forties, south latitude.  Alisa was at this point completely laid up by the combined negative effects of pregnancy and offshore sailing.  Nothing serious, but her third trimester is nearly here, and she is clearly getting past the point at which overnight sailing is a very good idea.

Elias and I kept each other company in the cockpit most of the day.

Lighten up, kid, this is supposed to be fun!

By this point we were only about ten miles off the east coast of Tasmania, but we couldn't see land because of the intervening clouds and mist.  We had great views of pelagic birds as we sailed along, including these short-tailed shearwaters:

and lots of shy albatross, which I believe nest in Tassie:

Two days and a few hours after we left Eden, we ended our crossing at Shouten Passage.  By now the weather had progressed from windy and wavey to windy and wavey and rainy and foggy.  We began to feel at home.

Crap weather - we like it!

Our first impressions of Tasmania have been very positive, even when the inclement weather ended and we were left with more monotonous Australian sunshine.  It's been fun meeting a few locals and, when they ask us how long we plan to stay in Tassie, answering, "a year!".

 

The anchorage at Wineglass Bay, where we spent our first few days in Tasmania.

The end.