A picture tells a thousand words, but you can't film an experience. Or rather you can, but the images won't capture the whole ambience, particularly when there's wind, sea spray, patches of what was probably rain and movement of a relatively small vessel on a rolling sea involved.
We were barely under way when the excitement began. Someone spotted a whale, which turned out to be a mother and calf, though both seemed disinclined to put on too much a display. Three yellow boats converged on the area, passengers standing for a better view, but all I managed to get were momentary flashes of fins and flukes.
Heading out of the bay, the boat loops around Penguin Island, a hundred metres off shore from Fluted Cape’s dolerite cliffs. Apparently you can walk across the gap at low tide, and the boats regularly head through the gap when the conditions are right, which they, predictably weren’t.
Around the corner, however, the engines went onto idle mode as we pulled up a matter of metres from the impressive cliffs, the first of a number of pauses to allow our skipper and deck hand to explain and expound on the caves, cliffs and assorted other features along the coastline.
Conditions didn’t allow us to manoeuvre between The Monument, a spectacular thirty metre dolerite stack and the vertical cliffs, but we got up close and personal with the Breathing Rock. It's a water-level cavern that fills with air as the waves ebb and erupts with a spectacular spray as the waves roll back in.
There’s YouTube footage here that’s better than the stills we managed to catch, and if you’re ever in the vicinity there’s a more spectacular Breathing Rock on DeWitt Island in the Maatsuyker Group off Tasmania’s south coast out on the edge of the continental shelf.