Andrew Dwyer – The Cast Iron Cook

The wind has been howling all night, the offshore waves frosting the water. I went to sleep early last night, but Robert and Aimee stayed up and landed sixteen arrowhead squid, my job is to clean them. Fortunately they are easier to clean than their Southern cousins, but the flesh is not as tender.  I have attracted a large mob of seagulls and one little cormorant. The seagulls can take the scraps of gut on the surface, but the little cormorant out competes them by diving down to retrieve the squid heads. It quietly goes about gorging itself, its little webbed feet propelling it out of sight into the depths. Time and time again it retrieves the squid heads, I wonder where such a small bird can store so much squid?

Cleaning Squid

Robert tries for one last fish

A tourist boat turns up and a man jumps over the side into the frigid water. On the beach I spot several girls in bikinis sunning themselves. We’re rugged up in overalls and polar fleeces. The wind is freezing, coming up from the south west. What’s wrong with these people? They would have to be Tasmanians – or New Zealanders.

Tourist boat at Wineglass Bay

We weigh anchor and motor out of the bay into a two meter choppy sea. Fortunately it is following us. A pod of dolphins send us off, darting about under the boat as we raise the headsail and bear away around a group of rocks aptly named the Nuggets that guard the northern entrance to Wineglass Bay.

Dolphin beneath the bow of Escapade

The day passes uneventfully. It takes until early afternoon for the mountains of the Freycinet Peninsular to eventually fade into the haze. Escapade surfs the swell, at one stage she makes 9.5 knots. The odd albatross glides by to check us out, its wings skimming the tips of the waves. The steep hills of the east coast fall into the sea, with ridge upon ridge folding into the Central Highlands.

In the late afternoon the wind dies down and we fire up the diesel. It is around this time the shearwaters appear every night. These amazing birds migrate all the way from the Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea to rookeries on the coast of Tasmania and Victoria, nesting in burrows in the ground. There are estimated to be 285 colonies in south eastern Australia, the largest concentration being in Bass Strait. On Babel Island in the Ferneaux group there are estimated to be three million burrows. When Matthew Flinders sailed through Bass Strait in 1798 he noted the sky was black with shearwaters, estimating there to be one hundred million in one flock!

There are few anchorages on the north eastern shores of Tasmania. St Helens is the one port, and the bar at the entrance is so treacherous the harbour master provides a pilot to guide you in. We decide to motor past St Helens and spend the night in Skeleton Bay, at the southern end of the Bay of Fires. The problem is it will be after dark, and no-one on board has been there before. Its my turn to navigate. I plot a course inshore of a series of reefs, clearing the onshore reefs by around 300 meters, then pass by the entrance to St Helens, round Elephant Rock to the north, and then bear away to the east and south into Skeleton Bay. All goes to plan. Off Elephant Rock we lower the main sail in a rolling swell. It is as black as the guts of a cat. I can just make out land, and the spotlight is useless because there is a fine mist. A chart plotter is a handy device, but the electronic charts are unreliable, so I am busy reading the lat/longs and plotting them on the paper chart at the nav table and calling the headings up to Robert at the helm. The last few hundred meters are tense, we are relying on the depth contours. We can hear the surge of waves nearby, and drop anchor in 10 meters of water. The bay is only around 300 meters wide, so there is not a lot of swinging room, but the anchor holds. Its eleven o’clock, but I feel like something more than a cup of soup from a packet, so I fry some squid in panko and serve it with dark Chinese rice vinegar and a lettuce and tomato salad with a lime dressing. The boat rolls on a swell at anchor, and squadrons of very friendly mosquitos fly out from skeleton creek to welcome us. It is around 1.30 when we finally hit the sack.

Bullets of wind have been sliding across the water all night, but our anchor held. I have had my rank lifted to first lieutenant today, Robert has come down with something and wants to rest. Aimee and I raise the tender onto the stern and make ready to sail. Felicity is on the helm as we weigh anchor and motor off to the south to avoid numerous rocks and reefs around Point Lesueur. We head up into the wind and raise the main. We bear away in a comfortable 12 knots of wind and reach southward. I roll out the headsail. I briefly think this is going to be a nice sail. Then comes the first squall which hits us like a brick. The boat heels and the wind shifts. We tack to avoid the south shore. We have to tack three times to get out of Chinaman’s Cove, always keeping the the south of the bay to avoid the reefs. Once clear of the bay the wind dies out to five knots, and then shifts to be right on our nose. I roll in the headsail, tighten the main and unfurl the diesel sail (start the engine). We motor off up the Mercury Passage toward Triabunna.

There is a wood-chip export plant at the mouth of Spring Bay with an exclusion zone around it, which Robert says is reserved for canoeists with dreadlocks, so I helm straight past it, and soon locate a starboard marker which indicates a shoal. We pass a fish processing factory. Hundreds of seagulls are circling above the main processing building and a couple of very grubby north sea trawlers are tied to it’s jetty. One has had its entire superstructure removed and hauled on to the shore as if it were a plastic model. I pick up the channel markers and we motor in to a very tight harbour. Robert takes the helm to dock. Stan the harbourmaster has told us to raft next to a fishing boat. All good except the curtains of rain that have been coming at us from the south have heralded their arrival with a squall, and there is a submerged rock right in the middle of the harbour, which means Robert will have to turn Escapade on itself with little room to spare. At least the rock’s location is clear, it has a bent metal tripod on top of it, clearly a few boats have hit it in the past.

The dinted reef marker in the middle of Trianunna Harbour

After deftly swinging the boat, we are aboard the fishing boat scrambling over cray pots to secure lines. With fenders in place Escapade is secured with springers and we come to a rest. Shore leave, and a chance to explore the fleshpots of Triabunna.

Escapade rafted at Triabunna

This could be our last stop before home, we need to refuel, take on water and supplies, and wash ourselves and our clothes. It is lunchtime, so we indulge in the delights of teh fish and chip van parked on a grass strip directly across the road from the jetty. There is a choice of Flake, Trevally or Barracouta. I choose the flake, which is caught on long lines off the coast here, and it is very good. Memorable in fact. When fish is fresh and fried in clean oil at the right temperature it is delicious.

The Triabunna fish van - "Fresh from our boat to you"

The afternoon goes quickly, I manage a quick visit to the Triabunna Coiffure for a quick hair cut while the washing is drying in the laundromat next door. They say the difference between a good and bad haircut is two weeks so what the hell. After that I manage a quick shower at the tourist information centre. Not quick by choice, but the damn thing has a coin in the slot controller that charges $4.00 for three minutes. Ca-ching Ca-ching.
The town has a very friendly tourist information center, and a few stunning examples of Georgian architecture. The barracks ruins are a superb example.  Originally built in 1843, they housed marines that were stationed at Maria Island. From 1926 until 1955 they housed a bakery that manufactured its own yeast, but then fell into disrepair. A project to restore them into a museum and restaurant in 1969 failed due to financial restraints, and so they sit in the main street, disused and shabby but thankfully they have escaped the wrecking ball.

The barracks

We are booked for dinner at the Seafarers Inn by the docks, your typical country pub. From the outside it looks like a quaint dockside inn. The inside is sadly the victim of some uninspired 1970s renovation, where beige is the chosen colour, vinyl the chosen upholstery. I was not expecting much and I am not disappointed. The menu looks OK, plenty of seafood and a collection of steaks. I line up at the bar to order dinner. The barmaid, clearly someone not to be toyed with, slides the glass window open. “What are we having love?” In five short words she has made two errors. Firstly, I am not dining with her, and secondly she is certainly not my lover. “Is the fish fresh?” I ask gingerly. Her lips tighten and she rolls here eyes. This is clearly a question she is used to fielding and responds with a mechanical, “Its frozen fresh when we get it love, twice a week”.  The old adage used to be when in a pub order a steak, they can’t bugger that up, but experience has sadly told me they can, so I order the kangaroo sausages, which end up tasteless and dry, served with the usual soggy frozen vegetables. On the way home I think, “Fisherman Inn, Drunks Out”. Sadly a prosaic experience, an opportunity missed. The food at the fish and chip van was a third the price and triple the quality, we should have eaten there.

The Seafarers Inn

View from the deck at Fortescue Bay

I spend the morning at work on the laptop, and we breakfast at 11.45. The boat is rocking on the mooring due to a slight swell in the bay, which means the seas outside would be fairly significant, and occasionally the bay is hit with a bullet of wind coming down from the hills that whips through the mast making the whole boat shudder.

Storm across Fortescue Bay

The chronometer on the wall reads twenty to twelve, as do the two needles on the barometer, indicating the pressure has dropped from 1010 to 980 as two significant low pressure systems cross from the Southern Ocean to the Tasman. The second front is to drop away to the south, so with a bit of luck we will sail tomorrow.The HF radio tells us we can expect North West to South West winds 15 knots and upwards which should give us a window of opportunity to sail north along the coast to Maria Island. We will ready the boat tonight to put to sea early tomorrow. Robert and Aimee have donned wetsuits and are exploring the seabed around the boat, which is largely full of a fine haired green weed that has infested the area in the past few years, suspected to be an exotic import that hitchhiked on the hull or in the ballast of a foreign ship. The worst of these is the dreaded phytopthora cinnamomi, a soil pathogen causing root rot that is gradually spreading across Tasmania. But it is not all bad news. Wakame has found its way here from Japan, and it is being harvested and exported back, infinitely better than the Japanese product which grows in largely polluted waters.  A magnificent sea vegetable which is simply soaked in water and tossed into salads. It goes especially well with cucumber.

Fortescue Bay

Around mid afternoon thunderstorms roll in across the bay. Bullets of wind hit Escapade and we shudder and shake. We have to reset our anchor. Fortunately there is no-one else in the bay, we have the whole place to ourselves. Robert makes some adjustments to the stern so we can easily stow the tender across the deck. I prepare dinner, which is instant polenta with a rich tomato and garlic sauce, arincini balls baked in the oven and a salad. We are getting low on supplies, I am hoping we can pull in to Triabunna to restock. I am also keen to call home. Whilst the cellular phone network covers most of Tasmania’s east coast, the bay we have been holed up in does not, so it has been five days since anyone has heard anything of us. Dinner over, I crawl into the quarter berth and drift off into a deep sleep.