Tasmania

The Orion anchored in Wineglass Bay, Tasmania. Photo by David Lansing.

Listen, when you get a cruise brochure and you see all those gorgeous photos of the places you’re going to visit, it gets you pretty excited, right? Golden beaches, deep blue skies, swaying palms. But it’s not always like that, right? Sometimes a little Photoshop is involved but usually it’s just bad luck. Like today. We were anchored in iconic Wineglass Bay in the centre of Freycinet National Park. “You’ll arrive to find the view is spectacular, with dramatic red granite peaks reflecting in clear blue waters and a near-perfect circle of white sand forming the beach of the bay.”

That’s from the description in the daily newsletter Brando, my cabin steward, put on my pillow last night. So heck, I was pretty excited this morning to wake up early and have my first look at “iconic” Wineglass Bay. Except I couldn’t really see it. Because it was raining and the wind was blowing so hard that it was picking up the spray off the white caps and pushing them horizontally over the ocean. Take a look at the photo I took this morning. That’s of one of the Zodiacs headed for our “wet landing” at Wineglass Bay with the Orion in the background. See the “near-perfect circle of white sand forming the beach of the bay”? Me neither.

But here’s the thing: It was great fun anyway. There were twin brothers in my Zodiac, 9-year-olds from Melbourne with their mother, and they couldn’t have had more fun. Just as some spray came up over the bow of the tender and soaked their little heads, up popped a dozen or more dolphins right beside us. They ran along side our Zodiac and in front of us and underneath us and it was one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve ever had.

Then, as we were slowly motoring around the bay, a seagull dropped down out of the sky right in front of us and took up a foot-long mackerel. We gasped over that but what came next was even better: Watching all this from a naked limb of an Oyster Bay pine along the shoreline was a white-belly sea eagle who took to the air and then swarmed down like a kamikaze pilot, swiping the still-struggling fish from the beak of the surprised and offended seagull. We watched the sea eagle take the fish back to his perch and commence with his breakfast. Dramatic and unbelievable. And not something you could script. So even when things don’t go exactly as planned, they can turn out bloody interesting. You just have to go with the flow.

The Nautical Nymphs. Gide is in the middle.

Every night when I go to bed there’s a little newsletter on my pillow. It gives me details about the next day’s excursion and an itinerary of events on-board the ship from afternoon tea to late evening entertainment (a sample: “Join Kathy and Terry for the songs of Andrew Lloyd Webber and some little known facts about his Musicals in the Leda Lounge”).

Two newsletter blurbs always catch my attention. One is the “Cocktail of the Day” (yesterday it was a “Bahama Mama”) and the other are the “Hair and Beauty Specials.” There are three attractive women on-board who run the boutique, massage room, and beauty salon. There names are Gide, Leah, and Sasha but Ian, the ship’s hotel manager, refers to them as the Nautical Nymphs. I’ve yet to make it into any of their facilities but I run across one or other of the nymphs at various times and have spoken to them about some of the specials noted in the newsletter.

For instance, last night’s newsletter noted that Gide was running a special in the boutique on “Merinomink” coats. This was not a term I was familiar with. So when I saw Gide this afternoon I asked her about it. She told me that a lot of women like Merinomink coats because “they’re very lightweight and soft but also incredibly warm.”

Yes, I said, but what, exactly, is Merinomink. “It’s a blend of merino sheep wool and possum fur,” she said.

“So a wool and possum coat?”

“Well, yes. But we think Merinomink sounds more elegant.”

I’d have to agree.

Ross O'Meara, center, making sausages from his own pigs. Photo by David Lansing.

Last night at dinner I was talking about my desire to find some good wallaby salami with Ross O’Meara, a pig farmer from South Bruny Island. Actually, Ross is a lot more than just a pig farmer. A former chef (he’s worked in several Michelin-starred restaurants in London and Asia as well as Australia), he’s also involved in a food show on Australian television and is partners with a couple of cheese makers in a shop in Hobart called Rare Food.

I really dig Ross (as well as his lovely wife, Emma, and their red-headed toddler, Felix). Ask him what he’s doing on his farm and he gets all animated and excited as he talks about his Wessex-Saddleback porkers and his heirloom chickens, and the lovely Bruny Island cheese made by his business partner, Nick Haddow. Ross is also a hunter and likes to take the occasional wallaby. “God, it’s lovely,” he tells me, his hands flying and his eyes sparkling.

Felix and Emma O'Meara. Photo by David Lansing.

This is all a bit ironic since Emma, who looks a bit like a happier version of the Mona Lisa, is a vegetarian. Imagine being vegetarian and being married to someone who makes a living turning pigs into sausage and the like. I asked Ross at dinner last night how long he’d been dating Emma before he found out she was vegetarian. “Must have been at least a month,” he said. “It just never came up. And it didn’t matter. Neither one of us has ever tried to convert the other.”

As I said, a lovely couple.

Anyway, Ross brought 20 kilos of pork shoulder from one of his rare breed pigs (in addition to the Wessex-Saddleback, he also raises Aubrey and Berkshire hogs) on board the Orion at Launceston and this morning Ross and the ship’s executive chef, Frederic Cyr, a lovely bald-headed French-Canadian, ground the pork, and then this afternoon we all sat around in the comfy Leda Lounge, where the lectures are held, and watched as Ross made sausages from scratch.

“When you make sausage, you want it to be 15-20% fat,” Ross said, adding that as far as he was concerned “if it runs a little higher in fat content there’s no harm done.” He insists on using natural casings (ox, pig, and sheep, depending on the size of the sausage) and doesn’t use any preservatives—just pure sea salt, pepper, and a little nutmeg and allspice.

Before Ross ran the ground pork through the Cuisinart sausage maker, he passed around a little plate of the meat so we could taste it if we wanted. A hand shot up—“It’s okay to eat raw pork?” I eat it all the time, he said, and I’m still here. When the plate got to me, I had a taste; it was sweet and flavorful.

The pork was fed into the sausage maker and Ross slowly fed it into the casings, squeezing the skins to keep out the air, and in just a few minutes he had one long inch-thick sausage that was probably four feet long. Then he tied one end and did some fancy little twisting and turning, like those guys that make giraffes out of balloons, and soon he had a couple dozen fat pork links (he and Frederic had made most of the sausages this morning). Unfortunately, we don’t get to sample them tonight; he likes to let them rest for 12 hours. So the plan is to have them for lunch tomorrow. Can’t wait. In the meantime, Ross has promised to get me some wallaby meat when our ship docks in Hobart. That should be interesting.