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Early March 2005 - Spirit of Tasmania II vehicle & passenger ferry at Port Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

IMAGE INFO

- Viewpoint is looking west-south-west from South Melbourne Beach towards our vehicle transporter, the Spirit of Tasmania II docked at Port Melbourne.

- Wiki info for Spirit of Tasmania II

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Spirit_of_Tasmania_II

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TRIP INFO

- You drive your car in through the bow door and it was tied down due to the poor weather outlook. We left Port Melbourne as the sun went down.

- Unfortunately, our hopes for a reasonably smooth crossing were dashed, as a big low pressure system moved into the Great Australian Bight. The wind howled as we approached mid-crossing & the Bass Strait rollers got so big that our starboard side sleeper cabin porthole was getting regularly *thumped* though the night by walls of water & the foaming white caps of HUGE Bass Strait breakers - no sleep whatsoever - it was pretty scary - needless to say, all passengers were banned from going on the starboard mid-deck during the worst of it. It was bad enough just trying to hang on & stop rolling out of the bunk! The sound of all the big vehicles below us banging & crashing against their restraints also didn't help.

- Unsurprisingly, we heard later after we had disembarked at Devonport in Tassie that the ship had suffered some significant damage to the starboard side of the bow loading door seal & mechanism, that would need repairs after it returned to Melbourne. Thank god the return trip 2 months later was uneventful!

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SOURCE INFO

- Original image was captured using a Canon PowerShot A75 3.2MP 3x Zoom digital compact camera (at M1 image size = 1600 x 1200 resolution).

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RE-PROCESS INFO

- Latest version re-processed using Topaz Gigapixel AI, Skylum Luminar Neo AI & Adobe Photoshop CS2.

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Uploaded on April 10, 2025
Taken in March 2005