Today we got up really early, especially considering that Nathan went to sleep quite late last night after his little nap in the car yesterday. I had to wake Nathan up at 6:15 am and he wasn’t too happy about that. We had breakfast and got dressed in record time, and by 6:45 am we were in the car and driving to Kettering where we would catch the ferry to Bruny Island.
We got to Kettering nice and early, and paid our $28 as we drove onto the ferry. It took about 15 minutes to get across to the island. We had a boat trip booked from Adventure Bay, so we headed towards south Bruny. We stopped at the very thin neck to walk up to a lookout. There was a great view from on top of the big hill that we walked up. Then we took the other track to the beach. We saw some little footprints in the sand that we assume were made by penguins, since the area is a Little Penguin rookery. They went straight from the grassy bit across the sand to the water, and the same footprints coming from the water straight up to the grass. We also saw other footprints on the sand that looked as if they came from a small hopping marsupial. The kids had a lot of fun on the beach. Toby kept calling it a sandpit. Pretty big sandpit! We picked up a few shells, Toby dug and Nathan made train tracks in the sand. The sand was very fine and squeaked when we walked on it.
We then drove straight to Adventure Bay. Toby had fallen asleep, so Andrew and Nathan went to pay for our booked trip and I kept an eye on Toby. He woke up just before we had to head off to the boat, about a 300 metre walk away. There were three boats to take all the people, and we were told to sit towards the back if we had any sea sickness issues, since the back of the boat doesn’t move around as much as the front. Needless to say, I sat at the back!
We looked at a lot of features and creatures near the shore on the way down the coast of South Bruny, and the two men driving the boat and telling us all about the area were adept at maneuvering the boat so that everyone on it got a good view of whatever they were telling us about.
We saw black-faced cormorants, wonderful rock formations and caves, a blow hole, seals, nesting cormorants, and on the way back we went further from shore and saw albatross flying around, and one of the other boats saw a whale so our boat went to where the sighting was. One of the women on our boat said she saw the tail, but then we didn’t see it again, so we headed back to shore. Nathan loved the boat trip, and Toby did when we were going slow and looking at things, but he was very distressed when we went fast. He doesn’t like wind at any time, and it was very windy and bumpy and he cried and cried and screamed and it was heartbreaking to listen to him. By the time we got to the seals, he was so upset that all he wanted was a breastfeed and he wouldn’t even look at the seals, even though he had been so very excited before the trip to be seeing seals.
Back on shore we had some lunch and started driving down to the very bottom of South Bruny to look at the lighthouse. We took a dirt road that wasn’t the main road. It was a bit bumpy at times, but we came across some unexpected lookouts which were very pretty.
There was a short walk uphill to the lighthouse. Toby desperately wanted to get inside, but the door wouldn’t budge for him, no matter how much hd tried. Nathan took a few photos, including the one below of Andrew, Toby and me in front of the lighthouse door below.
We drove back to the ferry on North Bruny, a drive of some 70 minutes without stops. We did stop on the way to see if any penguins were coming in for the night, but it is now daylight savings time and so it wasn’t anywhere near dusk at 6:00 pm. We made it back in plenty of time for the 7:00 pm ferry, the last ferry of the day. We thought the kids might go to sleep in the car on the way back to Hobart, but they didn’t and it ended up being a very late night for them, and even later one for Andrew and I because we packed up as much of our stuff as we could before going to bed.
We saw the sunrise! Daylight savings had just kicked in.
