Australian Wooden Boat Festival

The Australian Wooden Boat Festival is held in Hobart, Tasmania every other year. It is much like the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival held back in the Puget Sound fall. A number of the rock stars from Port Townsend (Washington) come down and present at the Tasmanian show – Carol Hasse, Brian Toss, Lyn Pardey. The organizers do a great job of turning the downtown docks into an open air festival. Admission is free and so are all the presentations for the four day shindig.

The weather for the show was pretty decent considering it is in Tasmania. A little warm. a little cold, a little sunny and a little rainy.

The tallships making their way up the Derwent River to the show was impressive.

The larger ones had a nice tug assist to the dock at the historic port.

Some of the tallships were not content to stay at the dock and went out with festival goers a couple of times day.

It wasn’t all old wooden boats. They had some nice classic 2-cycle outboard displays.

After the boat show we rented a car to do a bit of land touring. The weather decided to take a pretty hard turn toward what we might call winter. This is a picture of Bass Strait from Low Head at the top of Tasmania. This is the strait that separates Tasmania from the rest of Australia. It is an intimidating bit of water to cross in a small boat. Sitting in our rental car overlooking the water here the car was continually shaking back and forth from the wind gusts. Glad we were in the car and not the boat.

Touring on land in bad weather inspired us to go to some of the indoor tourist stops. These pictures are from the Seahorse factory. It is a breeding site for much of the world’s aquarium seahorse stock. This is what a prenatal ward for men looks like when designed by women, as the male seahorse does the incubation and labor.

Tasmania is also home to a relative of the seahorse, the Sea dragon.

While we were stopped at the Seahorse Factory we decided to stop in next door at the Platypus and Echidna display.  This is one of the echidnas getting a snack with her long tongue and porcupine like quills.  There big claim to fame is that they are egg laying mammals like the platypus.

I didn’t get any decent pics of the platypus’ in their dark enclosure, so here’s one borrowed from Wikipedia. Besides being egg layers, these animals are plain weird looking.

View of the northern coast of Tasmania, at the town of Penguin.

Making it to the top of the sand dunes near Strahan on the wild west coast.

While on the west coast, we had a great 3 hour trip on the old steam train that ran from the copper mines in Queenstown to the port at Strahan.  It began operation in 1897.

The steam engines are dual drive. One drive turns the wheels, the other is for a rack and pinion drive for the steep parts of the grade. You can see the rack running in the center of the rails here.

The locals and the tour guides always seem to have an air of great pride in their speech when they tell you that Tasmania has 3 species of snakes and they are all poisonous. This tends to keep you more alert when hiking.

This side of Tasmania is the wet side with a rainforest climate somewhat like New Zealand's, just a lot more harsh a weather environment.

Deep in the forests are some pretty impressive waterfalls.

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We’ve started our ascent back north from Hobart toward the mainland. This means sitting in the southeast anchorages of Tasmania waiting for a good weather window to cross the Bass Strait. Nothing seems to be showing up soon on the weather GRIBs. At least it is sunny here on Maria island while we wait.

Paul

Tasmania

Our trip down the lower east coast of Tasmania was nice. The best cruising we’ve done in Australia so far. Georgia is nicely tucked in corner of Wineglass Bay with surprisingly blue waters and a long sandy beach. We are at about 42* south latitude, which means that the weather (and wind) changes continually, sometimes twice or more in a day. Keeps you on your toes. 42* degrees North puts you on the Oregon – California border, or on the other side of the world somewhere in North Korea, but without the insulating landmass of North America or Northern Europe/Asia. Like most places we’ve been on this trip the locals are quick to point out that the weather’s not normally like this.

Many of the bays in Tassie are home to the little blue Fairy Penguins. (picture for Wikipedia). Chris saw a few in the water.

We did see a number of dead Penguins along he tide line. The park ranger said they were the fledglings that leave the nest and just don’t make it on their own.


Some days have been really warm. The island was/is in a drought that has brought on massive fires this summer. Here’s a smog set from one of our stopping places, Maria Island looking west into the smoke.

Maria island is home to a lot of wombats. This one is resting in one of the old island prisoner’s quarters on the island.

Wombats don’t normally live in prison. even the juvenile delinquent ones. They make these burrows in he sandy soil.

I’d tell you all of the fascinating facts about the life and breeding of wombats if it wasn’t for the overwhelmingly most interesting fact. Wombats poop square!! Don’t ask me how they do this. I’ve laid awake at night trying to figure out how this could be possible.
Leaving Maria we had some hitchhikers trying to grab a ride on or anchor.
The coast along he SE section of Tasmania where it finally turns west is consists of dramatic, towering cliffs.  

The towers and broken off sections make for a impressive view, but not one you want to mess with in bad weather.

Once around the southeastern cape, we anchored in the very protected anchorage at Port Arthur. Port Arthur was primary entrance for prisoners transported from Britain to Tasmania, or Van Diemen’s Land as it was known then. The prison was begun in about 1830, with the main buildings completed in 1853-1855. It was a new design, shifting the punishment philosophy from physical to psychological. This meant lots of solitary confinement along with sections of the prison where prisoners (and guards) were not allowed to speak for years at a time. They only words they heard were the Sunday sermons. About 160,000 prisoners were transported to Port Arthur over its life.

An 1888 view of the prison grounds.

We started our tour of Port Arthur by getting a ticket on a guided golf cart. It was just Chris and I along with our friends Sherman and Judy, off Fair Winds. One nice thing about the tickets for Port Arthur is that they are good for two days, allowing us to do the guided tour one day and roam the next. The first place the guide took us was into the old café building. This is the site of the largest mass murder in Australia. On April 28, 1996 a gunman from the local community came into he café and slaughtered 35 tourists and workers. He was later captured and received 35 life sentences. The memorial is respectfully low key and impressive at he same time. The most remarkable result of this event is that Australia banned semi-automatic and automatic weapons and radically reduced the number of guns in it’s society. This was done with almost universal backing of the voters. Today Australia has about 1.04 gun deaths per 100,000 people, along with gun ownership of about 13.7 per 100 people. This in a country with a healthy macho wild, wild west culture. (Compared to the US, where the gun deaths per 100,000 sits at about 12 people, and gun ownership is about 120 per 100 people.)                

The grounds are well taken care of with some restored and others just in a preservation mode.

The list of prison rules was long enough that it meant that pretty much everyone of them violated some term and was punished for it. Here I’m trying on the leg jewelry in advance of my next violation.

They have some big gum trees on the grounds. To us Norte Americanos these are eucalyptus trees. The main output of the early prison was lumber to feed the English need for ship building, both commercial and naval.

The dock inside Port Arthur is still lightly used by local fisherman. Here they are bringing large  rock lobsters. They are caught using the circular cane traps you can see stacked above he guys heads in the upper picture.

Paul