Saturday Feb 20, 2010 – Gordon River Cruise

I did not sleep very well last night so that getting up early for the cruise was difficult. Being on a gently rocking boat did not help. The cruise started out by heading out to the Hells Gate. This is the small opening to the Macquarie Harbour. It is 90m wide and 20m deep. It was not explorers who named this opening, but the convicts coming to Sarah Island named it. They thought these were "the Gates to Hell". In order to be able to make the bay available for larger ships a wall was built to change the wave action so the opening would not silt up. A hundred years later it is still there and doing its job. Today large ships cannot come into the harbour. We were told a story of a ship wreck in which the bow was on one side of the gates and the stern on the other.

Since the seas were so calm this morning we were able to go out to Cape Sorell. The first light house you would see from the ocean is the one on Cape Sorell. There are 2 more on each side of Hells Gate. If you were back in the past trying to sail through the gates it would have been a very difficult job.

On the way back into the harbour and Sarah Island we passed by a number of fish farms. Salmon and ocean trout farming has been going on here for 25 years. This is closely watched by coastal fisheries. Because the bay has such a small opening, seals don't come in. They are the major enemy of the fish farm as they can chew open the nets. Fish farming is big industry here now.

Sarah Island was a small island in the harbour that became a penal colony in Jan. 1822 and closed in 1833. Over the years vandalism took its toll on the structures. Most people stole the bricks for their own use. Any wooded structures have rotted or been removed Not much remains here now. People know what the area looked like because of paintings. Over the 10 years 1200 men and women were sentenced to Sarah Island. It was a brutal existence. The early work of the settlement was timber cutting and hauling. This did not take skilled labour. The trees cut were the Huon Pine. This is a very valuable wood especially for ship building in the day. So that like Port Arthur ship building became big business.

After leaving the island we went up the Gordon River. A buffet lunch was served which was delicious. With a good lunch and a slow moving boat, I was hard pressed to stay awake. The Gordon River is now in a National Park which is also a World Heritage Site. Logging of the Huon Pine was abandoned after World War II. The pine trees are no longer logged but logs washing up on shore or salvaged from the bottom of the river are still used. Since the wood does not rot very easily it is just as good today as when it was logged.

We stopped at Heritage Landing for a 400m walk through the Rain Forest. On the trip back to port I gave in to my tiredness and slept.