by Kelly Clark, S/V Sanctum
I was going to write about our visit to Port Davey/Bathurst harbour but our adventures getting to and from Flinders Island’s Lady Barron still has “eeck” factor in my mind.
On our way up the east coast of Tassie we had talked about wanting to get into Lady Barron, on the south side of Flinders Island. The tricky part is navigating the shoals. There are 4 general directions to enter Franklin Sound 2 from the west and 2 from the east. We pulled out every Tassie guide on the area, read everything about the shoals, which of the 4 directions to attempt, time of tide to enter, and the best weather. There is so much water that flows through the Franklin Sound during tide changes that the current can run anywhere from 2.5 to 9 knots in places.
We decided to come up the east side, skirting along closely to Vansittart island and follow leads up to Lady Barron. We had no Easterly weather predicted, were arriving at Flood tide slack water (hopefully) and thought we would be able to shimmy alongside Vansittart Island easily.
Ready with the best plan in our minds we stopped for the night on the South side of Eddystone Point. We planned to make the trek the following morning early. We had a beautiful evening next to the lighthouse.
Evan woke early and suggested we leave straight away (which turned out to be the best suggestion).
We left on a beautiful morning, the fog had settled in Banks Strait and with a 15-knot westerly we flew across the strait. The fog finally lifted near Cape Barron Island, the sunshine highlighted the significant size of the mountains on the island. We were able to check out some of the beaches on the southeastern side of the island as notable hiding spots, for the future, in a Northerly. We made our way up the eastern side of Cape Barren Island and slowed as we were just about at the start of our tricky knuckle biting journey.
The thing that surprised me to the core, after looking at charts of shoals was that I had envisioned (not sure why) that we would be surrounded by land with visible shoals. To the contrary, had the island to our left and complete open water in front of us and to the right. There was no ‘seeing’ shoals, there was no land, there was just our map to navigate by.
We started, Evan wanting to skirt right next to Vansittart island (which we should have done) but a book instructed us to start at a particular position and travel to 286 degrees from there. We tried that, we had 0 zero water under the keel very quickly (we have a 20cm buffer so not totally zero). Evan tried moving port and starboard, but it didn’t look any better. Slight panic and we decided to abort this and instead back up a little bit and head east to join up with Potboil shoals and follow the instructions there.
This is what we see, nothing.
Nerve-racking is a little bit of an understatement.
We were using Navionics and our chart plotter to navigate our way, Knowing that the shoals change whenever they feel like it is nerve-racking. We ended up loosely following the red line in the image.
I stood at the bow and with our headsets on and would let Evan know if I noted anything important.
It went okay with only one place where the water seemed to disappear under our keel. Evan made a quick, nervous, sharp right and found water again. Phew. Finally, we were able to get onto the lead lines designated by our chart plotter and with deeper water now under us could we start to relax. We made our way to great dog island, turned 323M deg north and made our way safely to Lady Barron, grabbed one of the two MAST moorings and with a sigh of relief, got to watch the sun go down. We made it!
A disconcerting part of this journey was the crashing waves in open water around the potboil. Places where the sand creates a shallow area for waves to break. We know that when we leave, we must follow lines that lead right out where the waves are breaking. That is for another day though.
We arrived in Lady Barron on Wednesday the 26th April, and we organised to hire a car for Friday and Saturday and the plan is to depart Sunday morning. We came all this way and wanted a chance to explore the island a bit. I won’t go into too much detail but to say that the island is beautiful. It is very green, has more flat farming land than anywhere in Tasmania! And some craggy mountains just to remind you there is some wild countryside.
I have read that Flinders Island is about 75 km long and 40 km wide. I was told there are about 800 to 1000 people living here. There are two townships, Lady Barron and Whitemark. They are both on the south side of the island and if you travel north there is no food or fuel anywhere north of Whitemark.
We were able to restock food (they get a barge in once a week on Tuesdays with food and other stuff for locals) luckily, we arrived Wednesday as the shops were full! Did our laundry, refilled our two jerry cans with fuel and spoke to many locals. The overwhelming majority of people said it was heaven living there. They seem to have good amenities and a great community spirit. You simply must get used to waving at every single car that passes. My waving hand was tired after two days.
You can fly into Flinders, there are a couple of airports in the area, including grassy ones. I would wholeheartedly recommend a visit there. You can drive the island in not much time at all, there is great fishing and bush walking and beaches.
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