THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE

Danger Darren had bought another boat. His previous one sank off a lonely beach on the northern tip of Flinders Island. Danger, Dave Globull and Duncan Meerding had made a dash across the strait under a full moon that illuminated a chaotic sea. The three Ds made it through the night, but all the rattlesnake charm in the universe couldn’t save the boat. Battered and bruised it began taking on water just past Killiecrankie Bay. Fortunately for them, unlike Captain Hamilton and his crew of Bengali sailors who in the 18th century were shipwrecked nearby on Preservation Island, the three Ds did not have to row to the coast of Victoria and walk 800km to what would become Sydney in order to survive.

In terms of Tassie’s pillars, climbers had been picking the low hanging fruit. But there was a pillar off Bruny Island that I knew was unclimbed, the Fickle Finger. It lacked the majesty of the well known pillars of Tasmania, but it wasn’t majesty that we were after. I’d seen the Fickle Finger on a Pennicott boat tours promotional video on the giant screen at Hobart International Airport. It’s hard to not watch the ad endlessly repeating whilst you’re waiting for your luggage to be spat out. The whole scene made me misanthropic enough to want to jump off a bridge, or scale a crumbling sea stack.

We put Danger's boat in from Kettering and headed off in the early morning light, speeding across