East Cloudy Head ...

 One of the many challenges posed by life on the farm is learning to take sufficient breaks and thus change things up from the routine of rural life. This spring has been wet and warm and has therefore provided perfect growing conditions – mainly for grass. I am not exaggerating when I say that we have achieved very little over the last few weeks other than struggling to stay on top of the grass, both in the garden and in the paddocks. To make matters worse, I feel as though I am constantly swallowing hay-fever tablets, blowing a very blocked nose and looking balefully at the world from sore and itchy eyes.

As the warmer and drier days of early summer have started to slow the advance of the green stuff it seemed like a perfect time to call a halt and take a day off, so today we downed tools and took the ferry to Bruny Island to do the East Cloudy Head walk. The walk is in the South Bruny National Park and is a 12km round trip out to a headland and back again. It felt like a right and proper way to celebrate the start of what the French call "les fêtes de fin d'année".

We both felt a little overdressed in long trousers and long sleeves on the drive down to South Bruny, because it was a bright warm day with no rain forecast. Of course, this is Tasmania so we took a warm fleecy and rain gear in a rucksack just in case. The first 3km of the walk is along a deserted beach which looked spectacular from the comfort of the car, but no sooner had we set foot upon the sand than we felt the full fury of a south-westerly blowing in off the Great Southern Ocean. So fierce and cold was the wind that the fleecy had to come out immediately and hats pulled down over ears. We cursed our ill preparedness for not having balaclavas!

Leaving Kettering headed for Bruny Island

 

A deserted beach and a raging south westerly

 Once off the beach the track was well sheltered by dense scrub and the fleece had to come off again! The remaining 3km to the headland was composed of two distinct parts. The first is best described as a switchback with a few steep ups and downs. The second is an unremitting uphill slog. Although the elevation gained is only 310 metres, it feels much more because the gradient for the most part is not that bad. This means that you keep walking relatively quickly, feeling that you should be managing the terrain easily. When the steeper pitches arrive, they too present no technical difficulty so again you think you don't really need to take a break. As I result I ended up trudging behind Cath muttering to myself not to lose contact and feeling a little spent! Luckily there are enough spectacular views along the way to make up for the pain.

 

Trying not to let the elastic snap

 

 

View back over the beach as you gain height on the track

 Parts of the track are have dense scrub encroaching on it and here we were very happy about the long trousers and long sleeved shirts. Any uncovered parts of skin would have been severely scratched within minutes. That said, the last kilometre of so the walk has had a lot of work done on it and the scrub has been slashed back very effectively. In addition, there are spectacular easterly views of Bruny's rugged coastline to sustain you up the final ascent to East Cloudy Head. The view from the actual end point of the walk is a broad vista of the south west Tasmanian wilderness and a it is difficult to do it justice with a photograph.

 Looking east along the coast

The walk back from the headland was very quick as the gradient going down was not sufficiently steep to cause the dreaded shaking in the quads. Back on the beach and it seemed that the wind had turned slightly from a south-westerly to a south-easterly and therefore was at our backs.  This was a welcome relief because it was a long slog back to the car.

 

 A glimpse of the beach through the trees on the way down

South Bruny is famous for bird life and we saw a lot of seabirds. Unfortunately I can't tell one of the ten species of albatross from a large seagull, or a crested tern from shearwater if my life depended on it. So the wildlife aspect of the walk was a little muted. That said, not running into any tiger snakes is always a plus.

Overall, it was a great day out but a pretty demanding walk that has left us both feeling a bit tired. I am hoping that tomorrow will be a gentle recovery day, but I fear I will be disappointed ...