Swimcart Beach

Thoughts on Location No 22

Swimcart Beach, Bay of Fires, Tasmania

It took us a mere five minutes to discover that Swimcart Beach was another slice of heaven on earth.

Situated on the Bay of Fires, Swimcart Beach is a free camping area.  Dean had found it on WikiCamps early Thursday morning and with a long weekend looming, we decided to pack, stack, and rack and high tail it over to the east coast and secure a site before the area became crowded and we were unable to actually stay there.

As we left Low Head in such a hurry, we had no charge in iPhones, iPads or laptop and spent three days completely cut off from the outside world. (Following one day with communications down due to gale force winds and I do have a 12 volt USB charger, but it refused to work – how sad.)

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So for three days, it was just us and the amazing easterly view of the bay:

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Then there was the sunrise:

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Then there was the rising full moon:

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And then, there was the amazing sunset:

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With a beautiful white sandy beach and the camping spots discretely separated from each other, we may as well have been the only people there.  We weren’t, the area was full and the couple of locals we ran into told us that this is normally the case, that spots can be hard to ‘secure’.

The Bay of Fires gets its name from the fires Aborigines were burning on the beaches and was so named in 1773 by Captain Tobias Furneaux.  Some locals will tell you the bay is named or the orange lichen that grows on the rocks – perhaps it’s a bit of both.

While at Swimcart Beach, Dean and I walked around to Binalong Bay, the southern end of the Bay of Fires.  It took us a little over an hour, was another unplanned bushwalk, and I don’t know about Dean, but I was very grateful the café was opened and we stopped and enjoyed a wonderful coffee with scones and home-made raspberry jam before we trekked back up the beach and around the three or four headlands to where we were camped.

The entire area was just a paradise.  We could have stayed for a month, mind you, the water was cold, too cold for me to get in, but that didn’t stop Dean taking a dip and then hopping on his board and praying to the surf gods for a wave or two.

We left Swimcart Beach on Sunday and are now scheduled to be in St Helens for the next eight weeks house sitting a house-sitters house while the house sitter is off sitting someone else’s house – phew.  I won’t disclose the location to protect the owner’s privacy, but we are in a little cedar cottage on 15 acres, there’s solar power and rainwater – it’s all very self-sufficient – not unlike something Dean and I would like to call home one day.  The only things missing are a few girls producing free range eggs and some bees providing honey.

All the same, we’ll enjoy our time here and just keep dreaming about what our next home is like.