St Helens - Bay of Fires, Cape Portland and more

We spent several days at St Helens, exploring the top east corner of Tasmania.

While it was still raining for most of our journey, it cleared up and we had a few lovely days of sun, albeit windier and cooler than I would have liked.

St Helens is deep in St Georges Bay, one of the deep bays with jutting peninsulars of which Tasmania seems to have so many.  We explored both 'prongs', driving out to the St Helens conservation area on our first afternoon, and visiting Binalong Bay on our second day.

We explored the Bay of Fires, driving up to The Gardens and admiring the many free camp areas that reminded me so much of the old camp sites on the south coast of NSW that I spent so much time in in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I hope it doesn't catch up to the much more restricted camping there now, but anecdotally people from St Helens are leaving their vans there and only visiting on weekends, so I'm sure National Park permit only camping can't be far away.

We were interested to learn that it isn't called Bay of Fires for the amazing orange lichen on the rocks,  but because of all the Indigenous camp fires seen as Bass and Flinders journeyed past at sea.

We spent quite some time wandering about on the rocks - Ben was insistent on getting to the top of the outcrop, so I scrambled up too, leaving Garry to watch from below.

We spent a day heading up to the top corner of Tassie,  stopping at Larapuna (Eddystone Point) to admire the lighthouse and old keepers cottages.

Our goal was Tebrakuna, the Wind Farm visitor centre, which turned out to be more of an education centre about the history of early settlement of the area,  with another tragic tale of the first people and their treatment by the early government.  Too sad.

The wind farm was amazing and we were very impressed by the vane down on ground level - amazingly long and thin.

Ben is in here for size comparison but you might have to zoom!

From here it was easy to see the off shore islands - Little Swan, Clarke Island,  Cape Barren Island and even the peaks of Mt Strezlecki on Flinders Island!

Did I say Cape Barren Island? I  guess that explains all the Cape Barren Geese!  I've never seen so many all together in a field.

We had intended to picnic here, but despite the great information Centre,  there were no picnic tables and it was very windy (well what can you expect in a wind farm?) so we headed down to the beach at Cape Portland for a picnic rug lunch.  Another amazing white sand beach (but the water was oh so cold).

On our way back we stopped to look at Blue Lake, amazing artificially coloured from minerals left from the tin mine.  There are warnings not to swim in it, and it is probably not a good thing, but it was very pretty.

We also explored inland, driving up to St Columba falls, stopping at the Pyengana cheese factory for a delicious lunch.