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Sail World - The world's largest sailing news network; sail and sailing, cruising, boating news

Sail World - The world's largest sailing news network; sail and sailing, cruising, boating news

Sail World - The world's largest sailing news network; sail and sailing, cruising, boating news

THE ONE FOREST Tasmania's north-west coast is blanketed by Australia's largest tract of temperate rainforest: takayna/Tarkine. At its edge, along the bank of the Pieman River, the former gold-mining settlement of Corinna is a cluster of cottages transformed into tourist accommodation. Walking trails radiate into the forest from Corinna, and the Arcadia II, the only Huon pine-built river cruiser still operating in the world, sails downstream to wild Pieman Heads. It's also worth grabbing one of Corinna's kayaks and paddling downstream to quixotic Lover's Falls and over the top of the sunken st...

Hell on earth isn't such a bad place. A harbour six times the size of Sydney's surrounds it, and it's just a handful of kilometres to the immaculate rainforest reflections of the Gordon River, which are like etchings on the water. It feels more like an original paradise than damnation. When convicts named Hells Gates, however, all they saw was a wild channel of water at the entrance to Tasmania's Macquarie Harbour. It was a notorious wrecker of ships, and the convicts' gateway to Sarah Island, imprisonment and a life of hell. But as the Spirit of the Wild catamaran idles outside of Hells Ga...