Southport Lagoon

Thursday, 16 March 2017

When we were in Sydney over Christmas, my good friend Julie and I decided that she should come down to Tassie for a long weekend of adventure runs, both for training purposes (Julie is doing a 50k race in a few months and I want to jog/hike the Routeburn Track in NZ), and simply because it would be fun.   She had an ultramaraton race to take care of in NZ in February, so mid March was agreed upon as the ideal time to come. 

Well March has rolled around faster than you can say “what’s with this heatwave”,  so I picked Julie up from the airport at about 10am in strangely warm, humid and rainy conditions today.  The first run on our list was the flat 20k from the start of the Ida Bay railway track, to Southport Lagoon and back. The Ida Bay railway runs 3 trips down to Elliots Beach a day, stopping along the way to tell stories of the past.  It’s a fair drive down to Ida Bay, so we weren’t running until just after the 12.15 train left the station. 

 Now when I was perusing this run on the internet (on the TasTrails website), I had assumed that the walking track marked on the map ran parallel to the train tracks. Unfortunately, after about 2k of running it didn’t so much run parallel to anymore, as ON the train tracks, which meant there was a lot of this sort of running.  

Luckily there were lots of grassy patches in between the sleepers, and not too many rocks so It wasn’t too bad, but it was hard to look around while you are watching where your feet are landing, so by the time we made it to Elliots Beach  (about 5k in) we were pretty happy that the track ended  and we had an actual walking track to continue on with.

The next bit was really soft and pleasant and traversed some gentle hills and grassy valleys, and about 2k sooner than we had expected (about 3 from the end of the railway line) we suddenly popped out at Southport Lagoon. 

We’d been running for 8k, which wasn’t the 10k we had been expecting.  It turns out the missing 2k was because we inadvertently shortened the run by ignoring a side-track we should have taken to a different part of the lagoon - we tried to remedy this on the way back, but that section was much more overgrown than the other trail and there were large spider webs with sinister looking occupants strung across the track, so we gave up after about 200m and retraced out steps back to the end of the train tracks. Skipping 4km wasn’t a big problem as we had a 4k hike to do later in the afternoon anyway.

We briefly checked out Deep Hole Bay before tackling the return train track section. 

Of course running on train tracks means you have to look out for…

trains..!  

Although the Ida Bay train isn't particularly threatening. In fact it's rather cute.  The 12:15 train only had a few passengers, the 2pm train was positively heaving with tourists which was nice to see. 

We made it back to the car by around 2:45pm,  it was a really nice start to our 3 days of adventure runs. Tomorrow we're heading down to the Tasman Peninsular.