Now I really don’t have any clean underwear left

Travel Tip #2: Boats shouldn’t have seat belts

Bruny Island charters - our boat

The art of taking risks is personal. I’m afraid of spiders, Hannah is afraid of snakes, and Doug is a little afraid of missing the last ferry off the island.

Today I had about 15 minutes of pure, intense fear — the kind of fear where you are sure you are going to die, the kind of fear where you are saying prayers to gods you don’t believe in, the kind of fear where perfect strangers become close, personal friends. And what was Hannah doing while I had my panic attack? Laughing. At me. 

Before the terror

The fear arrived when we took a cruise around Bruny Island today in the yellow boats (look for that if you go to Tasmania) and it was truly an unforgettable experience of natural beauty and pure adrenalin. I should have known when we got in the boat and they asked us to put our seatbelts on “low and tight” and didn’t tell me where the life jackets were that I was in for some trouble.

But for the first part of the trip, when we were getting close-ups of the caves and rock formations and amazing wildlife around the island the boating seemed fun — like going on a motorboat ride in a big, pretty calm lake.

And then our boat met the Southern Ocean. Things were relatively calm on the Tasman Sea, but the Southern Ocean held swells about 20 feet that looked like they would envelope the small jet boat we were in. And it was a calm day, they said. 

The swell coming toward me

We ripped through those swells at about 40 miles per hour. Up and fall. Up and fall. It was a 900 hoursepower boat, three 300 mercs — crazy amount of speed and power and really we probably didn’t have a chance of dying, but with every fall I saw the boat shattering to pieces and all of us drowning immediately. Of course, nothing like that occurred, and we were in great hands (Doug kept assuring me) and at the end of all of that terror lay great giant seals on huge rocks with beautiful blue water swirling round and they more than made up for my fear. But I didn’t really breathe easily until shore again.

Seals in the Southern Ocean

What I should have been afraid of was the brown snake Doug nearly stepped on as we made our way down to the beach on our after-boat-ride hike. Copperhead snakes in Australia are some of the most poisonous snakes on earth. Kill you in a millisecond, they will. And yet that didn’t bother me in the least. The snake slithered away more frightened of us than we were of it. 

At Isthmus Bay on Bruny Island

Once again, we had a perfect day, and Tasmania was glorious. Now how do we immigrate here….

Sunset on the ferry back to Kettering