⛵ VOYAGE #09 — Home

Below is the blog version of my fortnightly newsletter on the ocean, photography, craftsmanship, books and living a curious and exploratory life. To receive this directly into your inbox, subscribe.

⛵ VOYAGE #09 — by Nick Jaffe — Feb, 8, 2021


V O Y A G E
§
Home #09

         Welcome to edition #09 of VOYAGE: I often catch myself trying to think far and wide on what I might write about. Today, I decided to write about something nearby instead: Home.

Sometime in 2011, I stood on the irregular but more or less rectangular surfaces of tessellated pavement, the patchwork formations of sedimentary rock the tiny town of Eaglehawk Neck is renowned for. On low tide, one can stand like a chess piece amongst geological fractures and look out to sea — a gaze that would take superhuman eyes to the South island of New Zealand, where perhaps one might catch glimpses of Aoraki, its snowcap piercing the sky at a similar latitude.

The previous day I was cliff jumping, sailing and diving for crayfish. I dove down with my friend Tobias and watched him swim under a ledge from above. He was slow and purposeful, before he started kicking with force as he jammed himself underneath a murky rock. A moment later he began surfacing with dinner: A crayfish in each hand. He told me there were more down on a ledge to the left, as I hyperventilated on the surface in some vague attempt to over-oxygenate my blood for the dive, a tactic my dad had taught me. I would learn some years later during a freediving course that this trick is more dangerous than beneficial. Regardless of technique, I saw the antenna of the crayfish lined up on the ledge, as they all vanished in a heartbeat, my hesitant hand reaching forward. It would be another 9 years before I'd ever catch a cray by hand, on Lord Howe Island.

Tobias is a quintessential waterman. To be a waterman in Tasmania is unlike the image of a lifeguard at Banzai Pipeline. The cold dark waters of Tasmania offer so little incentive to enter them, it takes a special kind of motivation to build up the hours it takes to earn any kind of recognition in these watery arts.

Tasmania evokes a boundless sense of untouched wilderness and adventure — both in a real sense and also through its tourism messaging — it's an island which could easily be born of a continental drifting date between mainland Australia and New Zealand.

Five years later, Eaglehawk Neck would end up becoming my home. Initial nights in my house were a combination of joy and terror as I lay awake looking out my window, which was completely black, as if thick curtains ran across it. My first nights were without a moon or stars, as clouds absorbed the visible spectrum. Pademelons hopped past my window and every raindrop could be heard on the tin roof as every leaf ended up in my gutters.

It wasn't the darkness and the rustling of bushes that spooked me though. It was an undeniable sense that the land itself was haunted. As a holiday destination, Tasmania is everything it's advertised as — but as a place to live, there is an energy here I cannot quite put my finger on. Being a person of science, I'd rationally put it down to a dark history and the position of the sun, but as a human (as opposed to a robot), the place still spooks me a little.

For a town that could barely be considered a town (on account of the fact that it doesn't even have a shop) it's a place of natural and historical intrigue. Home to the tallest sea cliffs in the southern hemisphere, it's a town which can also lay claim to being just 30m wide at its most narrow point: The isthmus — now, repeat isthmus, isthmus, isthmus. What a word!

This narrow stretch of land was once home to very large pack of guard dogs, which turned the entire southern end of the Tasman Peninsula into a heavily guarded penal colony. To escape, one could swim off into the deep dark ocean (to nowhere), or one could take their chances with the dogs. If you walk down there today, there is a bronze statue of a Bullmastiff the size of a calf: Either the artist took some creative license or Bullmastiff's of the day ate a lot of English bread thieves.

In a recent attempt to widen the isthmus to account for the influx of tourism traffic, it was claimed the area was potentially the site of Tasmania's largest Aboriginal massacre. The signs announcing roadworks didn't last long, as the widening project was scrapped under pressure from Aboriginal groups who quite simply want the area left alone. On the other hand, the State government wants to perform test digs to see what's underneath the surface: But the biggest controversy? The chance of visiting looters — an apparent problem for many similar sites. As if total decimation wasn't enough, now their remains are prized.

My house overlooks Pirates Bay, not to be confused with the other bay. My view looks south to the surf break named Daves Place, where I hear Dave lost his life, surfing. It's also the same bay that Martin Cash the "notorious convict bushranger" swam across to freedom, as a means to bypass those enormous dogs. After further penal sentences and continued escapes, Cash became a constable on Norfolk Island, becoming one of the few bushrangers to ever die of old age, rather than by force or rough living.

When my house was running as an Airbnb (which will be running again soon, but more on that later because it connects into something else: More adventure!) a group of scientists booked my house and attempted to pull a large dive boat up my driveway. Now, my driveway is so steep and pitted, I recommend tackling it with a crevasse ladder as if it were Mt Rainier — anyway — they left the boat at the bottom of the drive and walked up to greet me, where I learned of their scientific mission: To search for Thymichthys politus — not to be confused with the search for ‌Thylacinus cynocephalus — yes, Tasmania is full of mystery. Their search was for the red handfish, which miraculously they rediscovered that week, after believing the fish was more or less extinct.

Speaking of underwater creatures and back to my favourite word: Isthmus. The local octopus has a serious problem with this narrow stretch of land, which separates the sea from the ocean. Those soft-bodied, eight limbed molluscs of the sea, have a terrible tendency to swim directly into the isthmus on their search for the ocean. However, instead of discovering a vast expanse of water, they more often than not find themselves on the end of a fisherman's gaff — the isthmus is also happens to be an infamous site for commercial octopus hunting. When the tide is right and the moon is at its largest, the shallow waters abound with headlamps and torches, as locals wade up and down looking for stranded sea creatures. A lucky passerby in the early morning can sometimes even stumble across a beached creature which missed the outgoing tide, plucking it straight from the sand.

As all this drama goes on at ground level, an Eaglehawk catches an updraft on the tip of its wing and soars even higher. As the easterly seabreeze hits those enormous sea cliffs I mentioned earlier, the breeze shoots up in a kind of reverse Katabatic wind, propelling the Eaglehawk to even greater heights. From high above, the Eaglehawk looks back to Eaglehawk Neck, commonly referred to as The Neck, which is also part of the Tasman Peninsula, otherwise known as The Ninch, a nickname I cringe at. Although we did have a couple of community Christmas parties I proudly coined Ninchmas, so I can't display complete snobbery.

Eaglehawk Neck is the longest place I've lived as an adult. It's coming up to March, which is both the anniversary of my escape from South Africa on account of the pandemic, and also the month of my 40th birthday, which I still cannot believe: I was quite sure I'd be lost at sea at the age of 27, that age where all icons die. Unfortunately it turns out I'm not an icon, just another man pondering his middle age, on an isthmus.

# §

Recent outputs

Recent inputs

Elsewhere

Buy me a coffee / My primary Instagram / Website & work / YouTube Channel / Workshop Instagram / Airbnb / Twitter

Reach out

If there is something you'd like me to riff on in the next edition or delve into further personally — simply reply to this email.

Colophon: written in Markdown with a dash of CSS in iA Writer, captured via Squarespace + Zapier & shipped to you via Buttondown + various tubes.

Nick J