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