By Paul Chai
The Metung Hotel.Credit: Rob Blackburn/Visit Victoria
I've never turned up to the pub in a boat before and, after making a memorable nautical entrance to Metung Pub in Gippsland, I may never do it again.
The whole family have been living aboard the "Halcyon", a 40-foot yacht from Rivera Nautica 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 to her. This is a mistake. We miss the first approach, try to reverse twice, even losing a safety ring as we bounce off the jetty and finally do a humiliating 26-point turn to leave the jetty and park in the exact spot I had originally picked out on the outside of the jetty.
I say humiliating because the whole pub is watching.
"Halcyon", a 40-foot yacht from Rivera Nautica.Credit: Robert Anderson
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 but 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 Pub is 80 years old, and David 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 but of course he didn't have his hat and you would be able to recognise him," Strange says.
The food here is generous plates of seafood straight from the waters 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 self-designed three-day Gippsland boat pub crawl.
The idea is simple, set sail for one a per 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 we 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 so you do not need a licence to set sail with Rivera Nautic which is a daunting prospect when you are standing on 40-foot of luxury yacht with zero boating experience, but Johns goes through everything.
"The land-based towns around the lakes are great, but 90 per cent of the Gippsland Lakes is only accessible from the water," Johns tells us.
"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 is so huge that you often feel you have the place to yourself.
What differentiates bareboating in the Gippsland lakes to similar exercises up north in the Whitsundays is 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 are heading to the Lakeview Bar & 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 that 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 & Bistro is a simple structure split into a front bar and restaurant with plenty of outdoor seating.
"We are the only pub on the lakes that faces north, all the rest of the pubs face south so we get some magic sunsets here," Peter says. He is not wrong and 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 Peter 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 some local kangaroos and a rakali, a native Australian water rat.
The following morning we set sail for Paynesville. For such a small town, Paynesville 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 Olive dirty martini before coming back to earth for dessert. We pop into the Paynesville pub on the way home and win dessert from the chocolate machine.
On our final day we are heading to Cameron Johns' favourite place on the Gippsland lakes. The special thing about Bunga Arm is that you are standing 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 Ninety Mile Beach, then a couple of minutes back 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?
THE DETAILS
MORE
www.traveller.com.au/gippsland
SLEEP
The Halcyon sleeps a maximum of nine people but is best for six and under. Four days costs from $2481 to $3809 over the peak Christmas and new-year period.
EAT
Metung Pub
Paul Chai was a guest of Riviera Nautic, Destination Gippsland and Visit Victoria.
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