One of the conditions of berthing at Kings Pier Marina was that we vacate the marina from February 5 to February 15 to make room for the Australian Wooden Boat Festival, which fills every inch of wharf space downtown with classic wooden boats. Since the AWBF is a big tourist draw as well as well as displacing any number of moored boats, finding another marina in Hobart for the week was hopeless. But the Kermandie River Marina in Port Huon, twenty land miles but fifty sea miles away, had space.

I worried about the weather for the trip all week, since the forecast models for Saturday were featuring gusts to fifty knots. So we left Thursday evening after a line of showers passed through and brisk northerly carried us down the Derwent and into the Entrecousteaux Channel west of Bruny Island.

You might think that the Entrecousteaux Channel is just French for “intracoastal waterway.” But the channel was actually named for the eponymous 18th Century French explorer, Bruny Entrecousteux. Also of Bruny Island. Entrecousteux’s exploration caused consternation to the British officers setting up penal colonies in Tasmania and Australia. Did the French have their own colonial ambitions?

Well, the names are all that remain of the French austral explorations. And the locals here seem to pronounce “Entrecousteaux” as “inter coastal” or just “the channel.”

The Channel itself was a lovely maritime passage between the hills of Bruny Island and the ridges of the mainland. The winds dropped, and we anchored for Thursday night in perfect stillness, sharing Alexander’s Bay with two other boats as the long summer twilight lit the hills.

Friday started with light airs, and we spent over an hour working our way across the path of the Bruny Island ferries cross crossing the channel. But a pleasantly unexpected little southerly breeze formed, and we finished our way south with easy short tacks across the channel before heading into the mouth of the Huon River aid glimpses of the peaky Hartz Mountains and glimpses of the back side of the Wellington Range.

The short run up the Huon River was also a joy. The river is vaguely reminiscent of parts of the Hudson. The Kingston area comes to mind, with rolling farmland on the banks and glimpses of 4000’ peaks around some of the bends. Like our home Hudson Valley, the Huon Valley is a major apple growing region. Port Huon was a major apple export port until Britain’s entry into the EU bin the 1970s killed the main export market for Huon Valley fruit.

Our original plan was to anchor overnight on the way up, but the breeze held up and I strongly preferred docking maneuvers in Friday’s light airs to Saturday’s maybe-gale. So we kept on sailing up the river.

The Kermandie Marina is run by Sean Langman, a Sydney yachtsman with a passion for restoring classic wooden racing sailboats. Our assigned berth shared a bay with the classic Sydney Hobart racer Maluku. So after picking our way up the mud channel marked by stakes, floating green bottles and orange balls (red right returning is really wrong) I had the challenge of backing the Mabel Rose into the berth without damaging the classic bowsprit of the boat next door.
Fortunately, the wind was light and we backed in without incident. It helped that the shallow mud helped stabilize the boat and keep it from wandering.

So we are tucked in at Port Huon this rainy Saturday!