We arrived here in Hobart on December 29th after a very fast downwind Rolex Sydney-Hobart Yacht Race.

It’s nearly time to leave again; tomorrow morning we’re racing up to Airlie Beach in the Whitsunday islands on the Queensland coast. It should take around 10 days, and I’m told the Whitsundays are amazing.

They’ll have to be pretty special to beat Tasmania though. Hobart is a lovely little city, with a very eccentric private modern ‘art’ gallery (the Museum of Old and New Art, or MONA) which is definitely worth a day’s visit. I managed to get out to a couple of the national parks here too (Freycinet and Mount Field) – the former on the east coast with exceptional beaches, and the latter in the middle, with mountains and temperate rainforest. Lots of wildlife too – we saw wallabies, plenty of birds and a tasmanian devil in the forest – although the only kangaroos so far have been roadkill examples. ☹️

Tassie has great food, nice wines and many excellent ciders too. It also has a lot of climbing, so I definitely foresee coming back here on a climbing trip. In fact the only downside is its rather inconvient location on the opposite side of the world to the UK.

This leg will probably be mostly upwind sailing; we have chosen to play our joker, doubling our final points. Hopefully the weather favours us and we keep on working hard!

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