Up at 6:30 and on the road by 7:20 which is way too early for the bakery to be open, oh well. So this is our itinerary for the day. Drive to Hobart, bus ride to Kettering, short ferry ride to Bruny Island, bus ride to Adventure Bay, tea at Bruny Island Charters’ headquarters at Adventure Bay, boat cruise, lunch back at headquarters, bus ride back to ferry landing, ferry back to Kettering, bus ride back to Hobart, car drive back to Richmond. This day in a nutshell … FANTASTIC!!!!! or as Chris would say wicked awesome.
Right from meeting our bus driver to leaving the people who run Bruny Island Charters make you feel like they have known you forever. Friendly, glib when called for, attentive, they just make you feel right at home.
Of course the whole idea of the trip is to get onto the South Tasman Sea, and did we get on the South Tasman Sea. It has been blowing in Tassie for the last four or five days and the seas are big. Get this 12 foot waves and huge huge swells. We can’t get to all the places the tour usually gets to, but it is more than made up for in the ride. I just love it when the boat crests a big roller and the bottom of the wave just falls out from below the boat. Your stomach just drops and there is a moment when you feel (well you are) suspended in air. This is of course before the boat comes crashing down on the back side of the wave. Incredible. We see lots of albatrosses even a rare sooty albatross, some of the highest sea cliffs in Australia, some pretty impressive waves breaking on the rocks and beaches and an incredible “blow hole”. When a wave hits this spot it is forced into and up a narrow fissure in the rock and explodes about two hundred feet, upwards and backwards towards the ocean. The guides say that this blowhole is “working” about once a month and this impressive every few years or so. It is without a doubt the highlight of this trip.
