St Helens – Part 1

Initial Thoughts on Location No 23

St Helens, East Coast, Tasmania

Both Dean and I agree that St Helens is a sleepy little town.  Nothing happens quickly around here.  You sleep late, you eat late, you got to bed late.  You do whatever you like, whenever you like and with no sense of urgency whatsoever.

Even though this sleepy little town has a population of just over 2,000, it is surprising what you find waiting around the corner.  With the exception of the expected (and convenient) businesses – newsagency, pharmacy, doctors surgery, bakery, corner store, slightly bigger (mini) supermarket, a local pub, and lots of coffee shops – there are also many others I didn’t expect to find.

Stores that sell furniture and flooring coverings.  There’s a large hardware (bigger than the supermarket), several surf shops (ok, that I can understand) and a car dealership that also sells second-hand caravans – there’s currently two on the lot.  There’s hair dressers, clothing stores, camping stores, a reject shop, and places where you can buy healing crystals and arts and crafts.  There are stores that sell hot food and cold food – but thankfully, no fast food.

There’s also an RSL (Returned and Services League, Australia), a bowls club (lawn bowls), a huge supplier of alcoholic beverages (ok, I can more than understand that), very friendly police (not that we got into trouble, we just got talking at the supermarket), too many real estate businesses to mention, and . . .

Ok, this is going to take too long, so just trust me.  There are a lot of businesses here that you’d only expect to see in much larger towns.

I guess you have to take two things into consideration:

1. St Helens is a gate way to the Bay of Fires; and
2. St Helens is the game fishing capital of Tasmania.

This sleepy little town thrives on tourism and fishing and over the Easter weekend was crawling with tourists walking around looking at, buying and sampling the local wares.  It was really good to see.

Dean has been fishing in Georges Bay, but hasn’t mentioned going out on a fishing charter boat – yet.

We are having a lovely time house sitting and have another three weeks here before we move on.  There is every possibility we’ll head straight down to Hobart and ‘stock up’ before we start touring around.  Our trip back to the mainland on the Spirit of Tasmania isn’t until the last week in May, so we anticipate we’ll have plenty of time to see a whole lot more of Tasmania before we leave.

Although we have had many days of rain since arriving, perhaps this mornings rainbow is a sign that fine weather is around the corner.  Fingers-crossed.

The rainbow appeared this morning just after Dean finished taking photos of the Moon through the telescope.  This is the first time we’ve taken photos with the telescope.