Greetings from Tassie! We're tied up at the Motor Yacht Club of Tasmania in a small suburb just to the north of Hobart, enjoying getting to know Steve and Dorothy Darden, e-mail friends whom we had been corresponding with for over eight years but never actually met, and their lovely 52-foot catamaran, Adagio. Over the last few days, Dorothy has been introducing us to Hobart, and we can already understand why most of the cruisers we know who make it to this remote corner of the globe never want to leave again. Hobart feels like San Francisco on a small scale, set on rolling hills with views of the water from a hundred vantage points and an easy artsy, slightly Bohemian ambience. It took us just over five weeks to sail the 1,800 nautical miles from Fremantle. The toughest leg of the trip was the 180 miles from Cape Leeuwin to Albany along the south coast of Australia. We had rounded the Cape with a forecast for 8-10 knots of southeast wind, but found 20-25 knots right on the nose accompanied by a nasty 3-4 meter swell. If we'd been aboard Silk, we would have been sensible and turned back, taken shelter in a safe anchorage and waited for some westerly winds. But Hawk can make headway even in those conditions, and so we pounded away to windward for 36 hours, both of us seasick and miserable. We were very glad to get into Albany and get the anchor down, and that experience was enough to convince us that we wanted nothing to do with the Australian bight, where westerly winds become a rarity after October. Instead we decided to dive south, back to the Roaring Forties, and make our way directly to Tasmania with the wind where it belongs - over the stern! We departed Albany a week later, but just a day out one of the batten cars on our mainsail blew up, damaging the mainsail track and putting the main out of commission. We debated options, but without the main our best course was downwind, which meant Tasmania. For the first five days the wind remained strong over the stern quarter, and we were able to average 175 miles a day under the trysail and jib. The last four days turned into a Southern Ocean sleigh ride as a 944-millibar low lying near 60 degrees South brought sustained gale-force winds and average wave heights of 15-20 feet. Hawk remained in control under the storm jib, though we did deploy the Galerider drogue for twelve hours when wind speeds reached 40-45 sustained and a few waves reached 40 feet. Not a survival storm, but one where we were well aware that we didn't have room to make mistakes. Nine days after we left Albany, Tasmania appeared on the horizon as a series of rugged, pewter-colored peaks hidden and revealed again by the torn curtains of gray trailing from the fast-moving squalls. Only when we had the land for perspective could we really measure the size of the swell driving us toward shore. With the island a full two hand spans above the sea, the swell regularly eclipsed it, reducing our horizon to the back of a single wave for several seconds at a time. Port Davey and Bathurst Harbor, the area we were making for on the southwest corner of Tasmania, consists of a series of interlocked channels and lakes similar to a Scottish loch. Part of a national park that encompasses almost one-quarter of the island, it is completely uninhabited and reachable only by float plane, boat or on foot. The large outer harbor is open to the prevailing westerly swell, but a battered wedge of rock aptly named Breaksea Island protects the entrance to the inner loch. As we closed with this island and the pyramid shaped rocks to the south of it, the waves dashed themselves into huge green and white whirpools before surging upwards fifty feet or more in fearsome white pillars of spume to smother everything in foam and spindrift. We surged by within a hundred yards of the tip of Breaksea Island, and the roar of the waves crashing ashore pounded away in my throat like a jet engine. And then we passed into the swirling foam downwind of the breaking seas, beam on to what was left of the swell. A few hard rolls and then we were behind the island, totally in the lee. It was as if the huge swells rolling in had ceased to exist except for the bands of white spindrift covering the water's surface. We spent nine days exploring Bathurst Harbor before heading around Tasmania's Southwest Cape (some view this as another 'Great Cape') to the D'Entrecasteaux Channel and Hobart. It is still early spring in the Roaring Forties, so there have been gale warnings for that stretch of coastline every day since we arrived. We managed to come around in a bit of a lull, and then had a magical day sailing sixty miles up the protected waters of the D'Entrecasteaux Channel to the lovely city of Hobart. We're back in the land of Internet, so please feel free to get in touch - we'd love to hear from you! Fair winds, Beth and Evans