Sail to Southport

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September 2020

By now we’d now been sitting in Cygnet for a total of four months and since our arrival hadn’t taken Allagai out for a single sail. Since our arrival we’d been focused on exploring inland Tasmania by car and had neglected our inner sailors. However we hadn’t really been not sailing by choice as for almost the entirety of the last fours months we’d either had no wind or gales, never anything sailable in between. For the majority of winter we’d basically been becalmed, each morning we’d wake to a mirror with not a breathe of wind or a ripple on the water surrounding us. However as winter was drawing to an end the winds were starting to return around Cygnet and with the return of the wind we were keen to go for a sail and so picked our destination as Southport. We had been to Southport earlier in the year but had missed out on a couple of the walking trails due to bad weather and were keen to go back and complete them. So with a little preparation to get Allagai seaworthy once more we headed off.

Southport was only 19nm from Cygnet so it wasn’t long before we’d arrived and were dropping anchor in the southern end of the bay behind Pelican Island. By the time we’d arrived it was getting late in the day so we decided to stay on board Allagai. However the following day we decided to head ashore for a nice long walk along the Ida Bay railway. This was a lovely walk which we had walked part of on our previous visit. However this time with much better weather we didn’t stop and continued right through to the Southport Lagoon. When we arrived the tide was out so we went for a short walk along the lagoons edge. However this wasn’t our only destination for the day as the walk also continued out to the end of the headland to Southport Bluff Beach.

So following our little break at the Lagoon we continued on our walk as we still had another 2.5km to reach the beach. The walk out the the beach was through more open grass land and low coastal scrub on a completely flat track which made for very easy and pleasant walking. With such an easy track it seemed like we were arriving at the beach in no time at all and were taking in the view of the beautiful Bluff Beach. With white sand and fairly blue water it was a welcoming sight as for the last four months in Cygnet we’d gotten used to the brown water that the D’entrecasteaux Channel is known for. When we arrived at Bluff Beach we couldn’t resist heading down to the white sand and going for a short walk along the waters edge. This also seemed like the perfect spot to take a break and enjoy the picnic lunch that I’d packed for us that morning. Following our lunch and walk through the surf we decided to head back to Allagai as by this point we’d walked about 5km and still had to walk that distance to get back to Southport. So with a final look at the blue water we started our walk back. That day we ended up walking just over 10km and saw a good portion of the Southport Lagoon Conservation Area.

The day after our long walk we decided to just have a day relaxing on Allagai and tried our luck at a bit of fishing. When we’d thrown our lines in the water we weren’t really expecting all that much to bite however we couldn’t have been more wrong. The lines were going off. That day we pulled in about 30 flatheads throwing most back and keeping only the biggest ones in our cockpit, which we’d filled with water to simulate a wet well. We were amazed by the abundance of fish and in the end only kept the biggest two as we didn’t want to be greedy and deplete what was obviously a thriving fish hole. This ended up being our last night anchored in Southport as the following day we decided that it was time to head back to Cygnet returning on a good wind forecast before the weather once more returned to calms.

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