Conditions
Approximately 240 km wide at its narrowest point and generally around 50 metres deep, it contains many islands, with King Island and Flinders Island home to substantial human settlements.
Like the rest of the waters surrounding Tasmania, and particularly because of its limited depth, it is notoriously rough, with many ships lost there during the 19th century. A lighthouse was erected on Deal Island in 1848 to assist ships in the eastern part of the Straits, but there were no guides to the western entrance until the Cape Otway Lighthouse was first lit in 1848, followed by another at Cape Wickham at the northern end of King Island in 1861.
Read more about this topic: Bass Strait
Famous quotes containing the word conditions:
“The strong sunlight, the wind from the sea,
all the conditions of its existence,
may have flaked off the paint, if ever it was painted,
and made it homelier than it was.”
—Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)
“Purity is not imposed upon us as though it were a kind of punishment, it is one of those mysterious but obvious conditions of that supernatural knowledge of ourselves in the Divine, which we speak of as faith. Impurity does not destroy this knowledge, it slays our need for it.”
—Georges Bernanos (1888–1948)
“Armies, for the most part, are made up of men drawn from simple and peaceful lives. In time of war they suddenly find themselves living under conditions of violence, requiring new rules of conduct that are in direct contrast to the conditions they lived under as civilians. They learn to accept this to perform their duties as fighting men.”
—Gil Doud, U.S. screenwriter, and Jesse Hibbs. Walter Bedell Smith (Himself)