Let’s catch the Spirit of Tasmania boat during a storm…

So in continuation from our previous blog, our car has miraculously been fixed on a Saturday. Fixed meaning our entire alternator was replaced on the side of the road by Lube Mobile, ie LEGENDS! Andddd we are on the road again. Or maybe I should correct that and say we are on the water this time, moving again to somewhere else.

This story begins on a very very wet Melbourne day, normal stuff really. But seriously when I say wet I mean it was bucketing down, rain going sideways and really no view over the ocean whatsoever. So getting on a massive cruise ship for 10.5 hours seemed like the best dea right?!

Well that’s what we did.

We boarded the Spirit of Tasmania cruise ship at 6pm in our beautiful car and stowed him/her away at the bottom of the boat.

After parking and collecting an overnight bag, we set off in search of our cabin. We had paid a little more and upgraded to a cabin, because we were boarding the boat in the evening and would be on it all night. A airplane type seat for 10.5 hours just didn’t seem that appealing when you could have a bed.

We located our cute little cabin on the 8^th floor of the 10 floor boat and dropped our gear. It had two single beds and even our own bathroom with a shower!

We then went on a tour of the boat. We had read that they had a few restaurants on board, as well as two cinemas! So where did we go first? To the food of course.

In the end we picked a bar and ordered some pizzas. It was very basic and the food selection was slightly limited and very pricey, but we were on a boat so who cares!

We enjoyed the pizzas and a beer whilst the boat departed Port Melbourne, not really feeling the crazy weather outside too much at that point.

By the time we were officially out of the port it was around 8:30pm and so we headed to our cabin to chill. We watched a movie and then after the exhaustion of that day, getting up early worrying about the car and all that, Alex went to sleep.

I think because I’d never slept on a boat before I was slightly nervous and so continued to watch a movie on my iPad for another hour or so. At that point I was tired so I tried to sleep.

Well the ocean had other plans! Not long after I had closed my eyes the boat started to sway. And not a gentle rocking sway, like you would use to put a baby to sleep. No this was a washing machine gone rouge type sway, where the water was hitting our window on the 8^th floor!!! Seriously crazy waves that if it were a roller coaster ride we’d be having the best time. But because it was a giant boat, full of cars and trucks in the middle of the ocean, well it felt damn scary!

Alex woke up from the waves and swaying, or it could have been me calling him because I was scared. Either way to help calm me down we somehow fit on one of the tiny single beds and just talked a little to distract from the sway.

What seemed like hours later we eventually went to sleep, the sway had significantly reduced and we realised we must have just passed through the Bass Strait.

When our alarm went in the morning at 6am, even though we had had little sleep, we felt awake and alive. Not long after the boat docked in Devonport and we were able to head down to our car and depart the boat.

It was really early in the morning and absolutely nothing was open in the city, so once we were on land we pretty much started to drive out of Devonport and in search of breakfast.

The journey to Tasmania may have been the most interesting and scary we have had thus far. Definitely not as scary as I probably felt that it was, after all the company has only ever had to turn around once on a journey but never had any issues in their existence. So we were fine and we were again in another state of Australia.

Bring on the exploration of Tassie!

Advertisement