25-26 October 2014
A weekend on the boat was excellent — a pleasant Friday night cruise down the Derwent River, a great sail in the D'Entrecasteaux Channel on Saturday far outweighed the slight disappointment of rain on Sunday. In any event, we still had a good sail for part of the way home. My brother has not long had the boat and it was the first time he had taken it away overnight. My son and I found it very comfortable; and I think my brother was pleased with the way everything worked. I particularly liked opening the locker marked "First Aid" and discovering the wine cellar.
Hobart - Southport - Hobart
27 October 2014
Master Map
One of dilemmas I always face when I go to Tasmania is how to fill my time. Because it was the first time for nearly 40 years that I'd been there on a bike, I wanted to ride some of Tasmania's great roads as well as spend some time with family and friends.
It was Monday morning and I had to be back in Devonport on Thursday evening to catch the ferry back to Melbourne. If I left Hobart on Wednesday I could take a couple of days and ride to Devonport via the west coast. The road from Hobart to Queenstown has a stretch known as the thousand bends as you wind down the final hill into Queenstown. Other stretches of the road — particularly west from Lake St Clair — are also fabulous for bikes. The only caveat is that it rains a great deal on the west coast and there's bound to be snow on the road in winter. Theoretically it was spring so snow shouldn't be a problem, but this is Tasmania where the advice goes something like "If you don't like the weather come back in 10 minutes."
Monday's weather was not much chop — squalls of rain, cold, occasionally overcast — so I amused myself solving an IT problem. All the while I was talking to my son about riding to Huonville to meet him for lunch. I had two motives: one to spend some time with him; the other to ride to Australia's southernmost hotel so I could post photos of Australia's northern-most and southern-most pubs on this forum. I'd been lucky enough to travel to Thursday Island, site of the northern-most pub, for work some years ago. Sadly I did not ride there on a bike.
The weather cleared and I headed out. At Vince's Saddle, the highpoint of the road to Huonville, I had to don the wet weathers but it didn't rain too much, and it was fine when I got to Huonville.
Beside the Huon River
We ended up at the wrong café and had a pretty ordinary lunch, but it was good to catch up with my lad. You have to make the most of the time you can grab with your children when you don't see them often.
After lunch, my son headed back to work and I turned my nose south.
For many years an argument raged about whether Australia's southern-most pub was at Dover or Alonnah on Bruny Island. I think it was eventually resolved in favour of Dover, but fate took a hand when the Dover pub burned down and someone built a tavern at Southport, unequivocally further south.
It's a great ride from Huonville to Southport. The road initially takes you alongside the scenic Huon River before turning inland to cut off the point on the way to Dover. It's got some great twists and turns and the surface is good, although you have to watch out for gravel and bits of tree left by trucks. I guess I expected to see lots of log trucks, but didn't. If you were out for the day you'd turn off at Geeveston and head out to the Tahune AirWalk, a fantastic elevated walk through the tops of the trees of an old Tasmanian forest.
It's another 15 minutes or so from Dover to Southport. Again it's a fun road for a bike and I enjoyed it. Here's the CB at the southernmost point of my trip, looking southeast over Southport bay. The sea over the stern of the white boat is the Southern Ocean.
If the crow managed not to get a skin full in the Southport pub and flew some 3,685 kms ever so slightly west of north, it would arrive on Thursday Island off the tip of Cape York where it could have a well-earned drink at the Torres Hotel.
The remains of the Dover Hotel, once Australia's southern-most pub.
My mission to add a photo of the southernmost hotel in the country to my collection complete, it was time to head back to Dover and have a cup of tea with old friends who live with a spectacular view of Port Esperance. Great sailors, they warned me that the weather the following day would turn seriously vile.
By the time I left them, the rain was pouring down. Much to their amusement, I put the entire wet weather kit on. We agreed that the most effective armour against the rain on a bike would probably be a set of ocean racing wet weathers. It was a wet and miserable ride most of the way back to Hobart, but it stopped raining for the final bit, so the outside of my gear at least had dried by the time I got to my son's house for dinner.
I'm not diligent about checking things and keeping notes, and I forgot to look at the odometer while I was at Southport but, by reviewing the distances recorded in these posts, at the southernmost point I had travelled at least 4,283 kms. Given the odd unrecorded running around and a certain speedo inaccuracy, it would have appeared slightly more than that, but it was still a good distance to have ridden.
