Charter a course for Gippsland fun
Bareboating your way around Gippsland Lakes on a pub crawl is a great adventure, but it is not without its hiccups, writes Paul Chai.
Ihave never turned up to the pub in a boat before and, after making a memorable nautical entrance to Metung Hotel in Gippsland, I may never do it again. The whole family have been living onboard the Halcyon, a 12-metre yacht from Riviera Nautic for three days by the time we arrive at Metung and we are too cocky.
So, when my wife Adrienne suggests that instead of docking on the outside of the jetty that we head to one of the inside berths, I decide to listen.
This is a mistake. We miss the first approach, try to reverse twice, losing a safety ring as we bounce off the jetty, and finally do a humiliating 26-point turn to leave the jetty to park in the spot I had originally picked out on the outside of the jetty.
It is humiliating because the whole pub is watching.
And it is with a heavy heart that I make the walk of shame up to the pub itself, past the people who have just watched what I consider one of the worst docks of all time, though publican David Strange assures me it was not that bad.
‘‘We have seen plenty of worse things than that, people have even fallen overboard,’’ Strange says over a beer in the dining room.
‘‘It’s mean but we feel like we should have scorecards like at the diving.’’
The Metung Hotel is 80 years old, and Strange has been publican for more than a decade. He is a hospitality natural, working a full room on a Saturday night under the watchful gaze of a huge marlin mounted over the front bar.
The pub has seen a lot of characters over the years, with visits from John Cleese and Prince Charles, as well as country music royalty.
‘‘Slim Dusty lived here for many years,’’ Strange says.
The food is generous plates of seafood straight from the water a few metres from the bar and, at twilight with a pint in hand, you can watch seals playing at the end of the jetty.
As we walk the few hundred metres to our floating home it feels like a fitting end to our selfdesigned three-day Gippsland boat pub crawl.
The idea is simple, set sail for one hour a day, dock nearby and head in for a meal. As part of the rental at Riviera Nautic, you arrive the night before and load up the boat so, after a four-hour drive from Melbourne, we arrive at Metung just before sunset.
We pack the boat and are about to settle in for the night when we hear a whoosh of water and are greeted by a curious seal, one of a pair known to take shelter in Bancroft Bay.
We wake early to meet Riviera Nautic owner Cameron Johns, who gives us the rundown of how to handle Halcyon. This is bareboating (chartering a sailboat that you navigate, operate and live on) so you do not need a licence to set sail with Riviera Nautic, which is a daunting prospect when you are standing on a luxury yacht with zero boating experience, but Johns goes through everything.
‘‘The land-based towns around the lakes are great, but 90% of the Gippsland Lakes is only accessible from the water,’’ he says.
‘‘There are two national parks that you can only get to by boat, and boating gives you the best opportunity to spot wildlife and marine life, including our unique and endangered Burrunan dolphins.’’
Johns says what he loves about the Gippsland Lakes is the sheer size, the excellent free boating infrastructure that makes self-guided holidays easy, and that it is so huge you often feel you have the place to yourself.
What differentiates bareboating in the Gippsland Lakes to similar exercises north in the Whitsundays is that you do not have to worry about changing tides.
The Gippsland Lakes system has just one opening, at the aptly named Lakes Entrance, and a balance is generally struck in the lakes system between the incoming sea water and the water flowing into the lakes from the river systems in the Victorian High Country.
For our first night, we head to the Lakeview Bar and Bistro in Loch Sport, a hefty four-hour trip across the lakes.
The jetty is surrounded by perilously shallow waters, so we have to negotiate our first channel.
Red markers to the port (left) and green ones to starboard (right) mark our way into the jetty, and any deviation means we will become stranded and have to make an embarrassing call to Johns.
We make it and the pub is barely 50 metres from our temporary home.
I take the short walk across the grass to meet publican Peter Arsenijevic. The Lakeview Bar and Bistro is a simple structure, split into a front bar and restaurant with plenty of outdoor seating.
‘‘[It is] the only pub on the lakes that faces north, all the rest of the pubs face south so we get some magic sunsets here,’’ Arsenijevic says.
He is not wrong. We spend a good half hour capturing the changing colours of the sky mirrored on the glassy surface of the lake before heading back up to eat.
It turns out that Arsenijevic is a Scarface tragic and the Lakeview front bar is a shrine dedicated to the Brian De Palma film. We finish dinner and walk home past kangaroos and a rakali, a native Australian water rat.
The following morning we set sail for Paynesville. For such a small town, it packs a whopping foodie punch with the award-winning Sardine restaurant. Chef Mark Briggs has since opened sister diner Sardine Cantina, a simpler version of the hatted restaurant, serving charcuterie plates, fresh sourdough and conservas, tinned seafood from the Jose Gourmet range from Portugal. We also have a cheese plate featuring some amazing Gippsland dairy, as well as local wines and a Mount Zero Olives dirty martini. We then pop into the Paynesville Hotel pub on the way home and win dessert from the chocolate machine.
On our final day, we head to Johns’ favourite place on the Gippsland Lakes.
The special thing about Bunga Arm is that you are on a peaceful lake, but just 100 metres through the sand and trees in front of you is the churning washing machine that is Bass Strait.
This is a place where the untamed ocean almost meets the calm lake system, but not quite.
So you walk for a couple of minutes and emerge onto Gippsland’s Ninety Mile Beach, then a couple of minutes back and you are on the lakes.
It is a bit surreal: calm and serene, wild and woolly and just a small slip of sand and trees separating the two.
It is a highlight of our lake exploration.
We are losing sun so we head back out of Bunga Arm and make our way to our final stop at Metung. We have had three blissful days on this special waterway, and are now accomplished bareboaters. So, when Adrienne suggests we take one of the inside berths, what could possibly go wrong?