The pink granite of the Hazards is roughly 400 million years old, and its colour comes from potassium feldspar rather than any trick of the light. Freycinet was declared a national park in 1916, making it one of Tasmania's two oldest, alongside Mount Field. The peninsula carries the name of Louis de Freycinet, a French navigator whose expedition charted this coast in 1802 under Nicolas Baudin. Long before that, the palawa people of the Oyster Bay nation moved along these shores seasonally, and shell middens still sit above the tideline. Wineglass Bay's own name is contested. One account traces it to the bay's curve; another, harder reading, to the whaling station that operated here in the 1820s, when the water reportedly ran red. A wineglass bay and freycinet peninsula cruise with lunch approaches the landscape the way early surveyors did — from the sea. This matters. The overland route delivers walkers to a saddle lookout between Mount Amos and Mount Mayson, a single elevated frame. The waterline gives something else entirely: the full 30-kilometre eastern flank of the peninsula, Cape Tourville's dolerite columns, the sea caves at Bryans Beach, and the fur seal colony hauled out on the rocks below Cape Forestier. Coles Bay Freycinet Peninsula boat tours pass beneath cliffs that rise more than 300 metres directly from the swell. The geology reads plainly from a boat deck. Devonian granite forms the Hazards and the bay's white silica sand, while Jurassic dolerite caps the southern headlands in vertical organ-pipe formations. White-bellied sea eagles nest in the taller coastal timber. Bottlenose and common dolphins work the bait schools year-round; humpback and southern right whales pass on migration. Great Oyster Bay, on the sheltered western side, produces the Pacific oysters and mussels that appear on many operators' onboard tables. Wineglass Bay and Freycinet Peninsula cruise with lunch tickets typically bundle that regional produce into the sailing itself, which is why the format has held for decades rather than being an add-on. Today the park is managed by the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service, with the visitor centre at Coles Bay handling passes and information. The daily national parks pass costs 24.55 AUD per person. The Freycinet Peninsula remains one of the few Australian coastal landscapes where the shoreline, the granite and the vegetation communities behind them survive largely as Baudin's crew recorded them — unfarmed, unsubdivided, and read best from the water.