Hydrowood salvages drowned logs from the bottom of Tasmania’s Lake Pieman and turns them into hardwood timber

Many a friendship has begun at the pub over a sherbet or two.

But for mates Andrew Morgan and Dave Wise, a chance meeting at the university bar led not only to a long friendship, but also the creation of Australia’s first drowned timber company.

It’s logging but with a big twist.

The pair extract dying logs from under the surface of Lake Pieman, which was dammed for hydropower in 1986, flooding Tasmania’s remote north-west forests.

Sometimes the logs are more than 20 meters deep

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A time-consuming process

If you are scratching your head thinking, “If this is so genius, why hasn’t it already been done?”

It turns out extracting logs in tannin-stained, pitch-black water in freezing conditions in a remote part of the wilderness is a bit tricky.

For the Hydrowood lads it meant making up a lot of the processes themselves.