Fleurieu Star Marine Adventures - A spectacular Cape Jervis Cruise with Keith Conlon

Rugged and mysterious, it is a hidden run of high cliffs coastline carving into Investigator Strait. But all is revealed if you join the Fleurieu Star marine adventure, and take the very picturesque cruise to Cape Jervis. Our departure port comes into view as we head down the sugarloaf hills at the Paradise Wirrina Cove resort towards the sailors' haven now called Marina St. Vincent.

The sleek white Fleurieu Star promises a comfortable trip in a 38ft catamaran cruiser. It has come a long way from its former life crabbing off the Queensland Coast. Who needs the tropics when you can watch the ancient Mt Lofty Ranges plunge into the sea? We are soon past the prawn boats and yachts at their moorings and turning on the power to skim at twenty knots along some of the Fleurieu Peninsula's prettiest - and most inaccessible - coast.

The cruise brochure promises we'll retrace the steps of Colonel William Light… and it delivers within minutes. The little bay of Second Valley soon comes up. As soon as he made these South Coast waters in 1836, the search for a capital city site was on. And this district immediately appealed to him. He spent five days walking through to where Yankallilla is today. He noted how tiny the harbour was though. From the boat, we could see how much the old jetty and boatshed row have become part of the furniture.

Inland, the holiday houses fill the "Second Valley" that Light explored. He called it Finniss Vale, after one of his survey team. Boyle Travers Finniss later became the colony's first premier.

Our skipper, Phil Bowey, wears this coast like comfortable old slippers. He fished along here commercially for twenty years, and now he shares it with his guests aboard. The crumpled and bent layers exposed in the cliffs tells such a fascinating and complex story that the area is a favourite for geology field trips. The plot starts gently a half-million years ago with mud drifting to the bottom of a warm inland sea and then moves to R rated geological violence along the way. Real grunt was required to create the folds and bends in the exposed sedimentary rock layers. Later in the saga, ice ages appear including a glacier grinding out a giant trough in the ranges that we now call Backstairs Passage.

Past a secret cliff cave with its lone stalactite, our catamaran cruise swings into historic Rapid Bay with its dark green line of Norfolk Island pines. Back in September, 1836, Colonel Light sailed in here to a curve in the coast he named after his ship "Rapid". He had the weight of a new world on his shoulders as he rowed from his brig to the mainland for the first time. Find a site for a city, a port, good land and waters for the pilgrims coming to their promised convict free paradise to be called South Australia - it was a big ask! Here in the valley above Rapid Bay, his crew set up a camp and garden in "as beautiful a valley as ever was made by Nature's hands", as he described it. It was Springtime. Imagine the district as our capital city, however; we'd need cable cars like San Francisco.

For nearly half of the twentieth century, BHP's name went with the bay. It quarried limestone close to the shore, and the legacy remains of shiploads that went to the Whyalla blast furnaces from the massive L shaped jetty. It is now a magnet for fishing families and scuba divers in search of the leafy sea dragon.

Rapid Head looms as we again swing south. The Fleurieu Star's skipper and guide Phil Bowey revels in its new status as a "hauling in" haven for Australian sea-lions and New Zealand fur seals. There were a half dozen lazing on rocks cleft from vertical cliffs above them, but Phil is banking on the group building to fifty or sixty by mid winter. They enjoy secluded and protected R 'n' R here after days feeding at sea. Perhaps they will breed here one day.

With a coffee and sandwich in hand, we're running to the toe of Fleurieu Peninsula. Captain Flinders charted the coast two centuries ago and named it Cape Jervis after John Jervis, Earl St Vincent. Phil tells the tragic tale of the wreck of the nineteenth century immigrant ship "Marion" which ran aground on the foot of the Yorke Peninsula. One of the lifeboats ended up here across the gulf, smashed against the rocky Yotto Beach. A Rapid Bay farmer rescued the poor souls in his dray, but it overturned… two shipwrecks later, a woman and her baby were crushed to death.

Closer to the cape, Phil points out a small, almost square entrance to what is a substantial cave within which is a huge significance to the Kaurna people's dreaming. Their great ancestral lawgiver Tjilbruke brought the body of his slain nephew here all the way down the coast from Warriparinga where the Sturt Creek leaves the hills. Along the way he rested and wept, creating several freshwater springs. After his journey here he turned into an ibis.

Phil Bowey slows the catamaran and points his passengers to a thin sandy cove.

"This is Morgan's Beach, and we can just see an old Iron boiler sticking out of the surf. That's the wreck of the Ellen. It was a steamship that ran aground in 1908."

Then, we see the modern lighthouse ahead that signals we've come to land's end on the Fleurieu. Phil came down the hill to Cape Jervis thirty years ago for a day's fishing and soon came back for good. Whichever way you look at the views - from the top of the range or from out on the water - you can see why.

On this expedition, our furthest point is just around the corner, at one of the first industry locations in South Australia. Fishery Beach was home to Mr. Haynes' whaling station in the 1840's. He caught seven whales in one good year, but it was all over by 1855. A few years on, however, and it was busy at the small sandy inlet again as ketches called for silver lead ore from the Talisker mine up a nearby gully. Three hundred Cornish miners and their families lived in the scrub high on the range above.

As we circled in the bay we heard the cry.

"Dolphins! Look! There are more of them!"

And there were. A couple of dozen bottle-nosed dolphins played in groups, jumping into the bow wave and off. You can never promise anything when you're dealing with Nature, but Phil reckons it is a rare trip when they don't see a few.

With or without them, Phil loves the stories at the foot of the Fleurieu, and he weaves them throughout the three hour cruise. You can find him at the Cape Jervis Holiday Units run by him and his wife, Lindy. He turns on a very novel way of enjoying some of our prettiest coast with his aptly named marine adventure on the Fleurieu Star

Details

Fleurieu Star Marine Adventures
C/O Phil and Lindy Bowey Lot 7, Flinders Drive
Cape Jervis SA 5204
Phone: (08) 85 980 229
Email: info@postcards.sa.com.au