Photo: Three Sisters, Blue Mountains
We left Chinaman’s Bay, Maria Island with Len on Woodstock and headed to Wineglass Bay for the night in preparation for the Bass Strait crossing. In hindsight this was not a good choice of bay as we rolled all night with the swell, we should have stopped in Bryans Corner, Shuten Passage, out of the swell and had a good nights rest, especially Len who was doing the crossing on his own. Early on the Wednesday morning we left Wineglass and sailed or motor sailed across Bass Strait to Bermagui, arriving on Friday morning. The crossing for us was uneventful, with the winds as predicted in the forecast. Len was not quite so lucky being a little bit slower than us; he had a more interesting crossing. We stayed in Bermagui till the following Monday and then headed further north, stopping in Broulee and Crookhaven, arriving in Port Hacking at the weekend. We anchored for 2 days before going into Cronulla Marina for a month as planned. Brian started maintenance work on the boat, polishing the hull, varnishing, replacing zinc blocks and engine servicing. For the first time since we left Auckland, we hired a car for a week to do some inland exploring.
Our first stop was the Blue Mountains, only an hour and a half outside Sydney. Staying in Katoomba, we visited Echo Point, where we bush walked for a couple of hours, seeing the Three Sisters rock formation and then along the cliff top down the valley to a waterfall and then onto the skyway station. It was getting late in the day, so we did not have time to walk the complete trail back to Echo Point so we took the Skyway back to the top and then caught the bus back to where we had parked the car. The following day we drove along the scenic drive, stopping at various lookouts to Jenolan Caves. We did the 90 minute tour of the Lucas cave, seeing the fantastic rock formations, stalagmites, stalactites and caverns. We drove back to Cronulla for a night before heading off again, this time to Canberra.
Canberra was 3 hrs from Sydney along very good highways and was an interesting city with the layout of wide, tree lined avenues linking large circular roads and satellite suburbs. It is having its centenary in 2013, and is in need of some tender loving care. We visited the old and new parliament buildings, totally different and spent many hours at the war museum and walking along ANZAC Avenue. The war museum is very well done and worth the visit, entry was free or a gold coin donation. Before we left we also drove out to the Deep Space Communications Centre.
Back in Cronulla, Brian continued maintenance work on the boat in preparation for when we return from Auckland to continue our journey north. Cronulla, Port Hacking is a great place with easy access to trains for Sydney and the airport, shops, restaurants, cafes and walks all within a kilometer of the marina. The marina staff is friendly and friends we met in Bermagui are also here on their catamaran, so lots of socialising. There is a great, almost curiosity style book shop near the train station that sells second hand and new books, it is packed with books and we easily spent an hour or so browsing around, an ideal place to restock Dol’s library.
We are now heading back to Auckland for 10 days to attend the wedding of a couple of good friends, catch up with family and friends. We have managed to make contact with cruising friends from Auckland, Sean and Erin on Whimsey, but could not arrange a mutually convenient time to meet; we will do this on our return to Australia before we head further north.
The next blog update will be on our return, from somewhere further up the east coast of Australia.