The Huon River

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March 2020

After six weeks of maintenance it was finally time to weigh anchor and get moving again. Our first adventure was to get to Huonville which involved steaming up the entire navigable part of the Huon River. The day we left Cygnet and headed up the Huon River we decided to only go as far as Port Huon so we had the entire following day to make the journey. The first section of the Huon River, Cygnet to Port Huon, was wide, deep and completely navigable. However the river after Port Huon was completely different, it turned into a true river. The river became more shallow and windy, we had to stick to the outer edges of the bends, follow channel markers and lookout for snags and logs.

We reached Huonville around lunch time and the plan was to tie up to the public wharf. However when we arrived our plan had to quickly change when we found someone else was on the wharf and after a quick chat rudely told us that they didn’t want to raft up. This left us trying to anchor but we knew it was well published that the bottom of the river there was slate rock and completely unanchorable. However with little choice we had to try but after dragging multiple times throughout the day we ended up giving up. Instead we weighed anchor and headed a little further back down the river where the bottom was depicted as being mud.

We ended up staying anchored there for a couple of nights and since our main goal in Huonville was to resupply we thought we’d try from the anchorage. This involved us assembling the folding dingy and motoring the two miles back upriver to Huonville. Once there we then tied the dingy up to the boat ramp and walked up to the supermarket to buy groceries before heading back to Allagai. This proved to be a little bit more effort then it was worth. So after this one run we decided to just wait until we could get to the wharf as it would take days and too much fuel to do a complete reprovision this way. Thankfully we were in luck and the following morning the boat which had been on the public jetty motored past us. So as soon as they disappeared around the bend we weighed anchor and headed back up to Huonville where we finished resupplying, using the bikes to speed the process up. Allagai was finally full to the brim again with food and ready for a long term expedition.

However before leaving Huonville we couldn’t resist going exploring past the Huonville bridge in the dingy. With a full tank of fuel and a picnic of food we headed off. This part of the Huon river was beautiful with large trees over hanging the water and we had the most perfect weather giving us mirror image reflections. A few miles up the river we came to our first set of rapids and with Hugo’s expert navigation we managed to get past them. However it wasn’t long before we reached a second more intense set which were a little to much for our small dingy. So this left us having to turn around and head back to Allagai, enjoying our picnic lunch at a stop on a public jetty along the way.

Once back on board and having done all we needed to do in Huonville we were ready to leave. So we cast off our mooring lines and headed back down the river. However we weren’t leaving the river completely instead we were heading about half way down to anchor in front of the small township of Franklin. Even though Franklin was a situated on the river it still had a strong boating community with a small marina, chandlery and was the home of the Wooden Boat Building School. Our stay in Franklin was quite peaceful we spent time walking around the town and exploring the river in our dingy. The land across from Franklin was actually an island, Egg Island, and offered an interesting place to look at from the dingy with plenty of bird life to watch. We were also able to easily cross to the other side through a canal made between islands so there was plenty to explore, although you couldn’t go ashore due to the extremely dense scrub.

After spending a couple of days in Franklin it was time to move on. We wanted to get back into the D’Entrecasteaux Channel and slowly explore what we had gone past quickly in January. Our first stop of our exploration of the Channel was to be Southport, although we didn’t plan to take a direct route.

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