Adventures in Tasmania

SPAIN BAY
On our fifth morning, we awake in our camp at Spain Bay to an unusual sound: an engine. The manmade intrusion is a welcome one; after just a few days we’d grown accustomed to hearing nothing but pounding surf and wind.

We hail the vessel on the radio, and learn she is the Velocity, a two-man cray-fishing boat headed east along the coast. We ask for a ride around a couple of daunting stretches of coastline without suitable landing beaches. We also are eager to watch a working cray—or lobster—boat at work.

Velocity’s captain is David Wyatt. While lobstering is his business, the surfboards hanging in the rigging give away his real passion. Wyatt and his 22-year-old deckie, Nick Harris, have a simple routine at sea: Fish, surf, fish, surf, sleep, fish, surf, surf, fish, etc.

The pair has been up for about 24 hours, and, after grabbing just an hour of sleep, is ready for the return. They had “shot” (or placed) lobster pots during the night and will retrieve them on the way back home. The weather had been, in David’s words, “niggly,” which translates as 35-foot seas with lots of wind, making for rough, rough sailing. “My back can’t take it anymore, all that jarring and crashing,” he complains, from his suspension-rigged captain’s chair.

He has 50 pots; a license today for just a single pot trades for almost $35,000. Via attrition, the Tasmanian cray fleet has declined from 350 boats ten years ago to 280 today. It is grueling work, but can certainly be profitable. Wyatt says one reason business is good here is a well-managed fishery. “Ten years ago, there were fewer cray and more fishermen. Now the balance seems to be good,” he says.

As David steers the boat from buoy to buoy, Nick throws a metal grapple, snagging the lines connecting each pot to the buoy that marks its location. He then wraps the line around a rotating drum, and the pots—made of bent metal rods and cane, baited with barracuda heads—lurch out of the sea.

Inside each are five to 20 bright red crayfish. Taking them out by rubber-gloved hand, Nick lays a measure against their tails to make sure they are mature enough. He tosses back more than he keeps. The keepers are slid down a short PVC pipe into a saltwater tank.

As we push our kayaks off the Velocity’s transom at the end of our ride, Wyatt tosses still-moving lobsters into the cockpits of our boats.

ADVENTURE BAY
Adventure Bay is named after one of Captain Cook’s boats, the H.M.S. Adventure, which arrived here in 1773 captained by Tobias Furneaux. He and the Adventure stayed in this bay long enough to meet some local inhabitants, plant some trees, name a few penguin species, and cut some trees. Those early visitors admired the natives spear-throwing accuracy and diving prowess; for their part, the locals couldn’t figure out why these big ships kept arriving sans women, and they frequently checked the sailors’ private parts to ensure they were really men.

But the westerner who used the big, sheltered bay most often was Captain William Bligh, who stopped here with the H.M.S. Bounty in 1788 before heading for Tahiti and his infamous mutiny. He would return three more times. Our departure from Adventure Bay began across the road from the Bligh Museum, a brick building built by convicts from the ruins of an old church.

We elect to portage our kayaks over the sand isthmus that separates South and North Bruny Islands. The area is home to nesting penguins, and we paddle past a few babies before surfing our kayaks into the beach. We then hump the heavy boats up and over the dunes, lower them down a 30-foot cliff and discover that the tide is out, meaning we must drag them a quarter mile over wet sand.

At the end of the day, just before paddling toward our camp at Great Bay, we stop on the rocks to pick dinner, big bags of oysters and mussels. Not wanting to wait, we dig the spice bag out of Alex’s kayak and, armed with lemon and Tabasco, sit on the rocks and eat dozens of big, meaty oysters—a feast that would have cost hundreds of dollars in any restaurant.

THE TASMAN PENINSULA
Rounding the corner of the Tasman Peninsula nearly 200 miles from where we began, far off the mainland, we are rewarded by the most stunning views I’ve seen from the seat of a kayak. From the base of Cape Pillar, I tilt my head back as far as it will go and look up the tall, cylindrical rock stack rising nearly 1,000 feet straight out of the sea. The swell is big but rolling and we are able to back right up to the wall and sit and gape some more.

Across the channel an all-male seal colony dries out under organ-pipe rocks; a rickety wooden staircase leads up a steep hill to a 100-year-old lighthouse. In its early days the lighthouse required a big staff, since its light was generated by hand crank, requiring an hourly rotation. Lighthouse supplies were unloaded via bucket and winch, remnants of which still cling to the steep hill.

Further south, at the very tip of the Tasman Peninsula, a pair of tall, slender stacks rises several hundred feet straight out of the sea. The Pinnacle and Candlestick are accessible via land, thus popular among climbers; beautiful, they are like rock sirens luring boats and climbers.

Paddling north, we trace a coastline filled with geologic inspirations: arches and caves, blowholes, more spires. We poke the tips of our kayaks into sea caves and find a few that make right turns inside before leading us back out to sea.

MUTTON-BIRDS
The channel is bathed in sunshine but lashed by whitecaps, thanks to strong wind meeting strong current. Charles Willis’s “tinney”–a 17-foot-long aluminum boat with a deep V hull and 70 horsepower Yamaha—bashes through the waves with just an occasional spray over its windshield.

The Bass Strait separating Tasmania from mainland Australia is as rough, capricious, and dangerous as any water on the planet, a moat protecting Tasmania from the casual visitor. The straight is shallow and easily disturbed; when the winds arrive out of the west they scream through the narrow funnel, whipping the seas into a maelstrom.

We’ve made our way to the Furneaux Islands. There are 70 in all, and the largest, Flinders, is 20 miles by 40 miles and home to just 800 farmers and fishermen. We’ve come for the 12 million short-tailed shearwaters, or mutton-birds, that also call the islands home. Each spring the mutton-birds migrate to 150 colonies on Tasmania’s coasts and offshore islands to breed and nest. Hunted by aboriginals and then Europeans (who dubbed them “flying sheep”), the birds spend their days diving for fish, squid, and krill.

They migrate 18,000 miles each year, from Tasmania to the Arctic, and return each year to the same burrow to lay a single egg, just a few feet from where they themselves were hatched. The birds fly 220 miles a day, live an average of 38 years, and—we’re told—taste like oily sheep. The usually return here on the same day, Sept. 27. Still admired by some for the oil and meat, the take from Tasmanian islands is 15,000 birds.

Charles Willis’s family goes back many generations on these islands; they are part aboriginal. He is taking us out to his family’s mutton-birding shack on Big Dog Island, where 2 million mutton-birds make their summer home.

The Willis shack is 50 years old, its corrugated and plank walls covered on the interior with pages torn from movie magazines to help keep the winds out. It is used just once a year, for just one month, so doesn’t require much maintenance. We arrive to find a starling nest as big as a garbage can in the stovepipe.

Charles demonstrates the hunting technique. Fully prone among tall tussock grass, he reaches an entire arm into a burrow. The risk here is that instead of a chick, the hole could be inhabited by a venomous tiger snake. He’s in luck, though, and pulls out a month-old chick. Fluffy, down-covered, grey, weighing just a couple pounds, blinking in the light. If it were one month later, the chick would weigh four to five pounds and would have its neck cleanly snapped, be plucked, scalded, salted and sold as food for about $5.

Since it’s not yet season, Charles gently nudges it back down the dirt burrow. On his fourth hole he lets out with a loud “bastard!” … and pulls up with a bird that’s as surprised as he is. No chick, but a full-grown adult obviously taking a day off or without a chick this season. “That’s rare,” he laughs.

With a boost from Charles, the compact bird with a three-foot wingspan is off into the air, soaring downhill over the golden tussocks and out over the blue, calming sea.