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 Gates, the sea is in a good mood. In winter, the average wave height here is five metres, but this summer day the Southern Ocean rolls beneath the boat like small corrugations.Twin lighthouses sit at the harbour entrance, blinking their warnings each night, and if you head west from here it s 15,000 kilometres to the next landfall, which is Argentina. The Spirit of the Wild, however, is heading e