With registrations due to open later this month for the 2025 Australian Wooden Boat Festival, we thought it might be a good time to have a chat with the Festival Director and General Manager Paul Stephanus about his philosophy on the event, why you should make the effort to attend and the process for registering your boat.

It’s very low key event held on the beach at Sorrento to the west of the launching ramp. It's more of a family gathering, based around the extended Wooden Boatshop family. The Phillips boat shed opens onto the beach providing a vantage point and shade to keep the ice boxes cool. The dinghies are rowed or sailed and anchored ready for the rowing and sailing races later in the day.

As the name suggests, the rally is held on the main waterfront of Paynesville on the edge of the beautiful Gippsland’s Lakes with McMillan Straight separating Paynesville from Raymond Island, a five-minute, 150m ferry ride away. Raymond Island has a famous koala colony to its name.

OK, the forecast wasn’t great. Four days of temperatures in the high 30’s with either gusty northerlies or no wind at all. But as a wise sailor friend of mine constantly reminds me … “ITS JUST A FORECAST!”

Wooden Boat Festivals are strange ritualistic occasions. Beautiful (and occasionally not so beautiful) craft gather in one spot, flaunting their curvaceous bodies, and sparkling varnished jewels in the bursts of sunshine, as crowds mill around the pontoons, pontificating on the worthiness and attributes of each vessel

Six engaging speaker sessions will take place each day at the Maritime Museum, with films playing on rotation all weekend long. All are invited to join the celebration! Entry is free but bookings are recommended.

Here are the details of seven upcoming diverse wooden boat festivals… Whether you are in Victoria, NSW, Tasmania, Queensland or Auckland, there’s a celebration to get involved with. The pulse of our special field of interest seems to be beating a little more strongly!

“One of the best things about the class, he says, is the people. “I've met a lot of good people and some of them are my best mates now which is pretty amazing. If they aren’t mates they become mates pretty quick.” 

Each of these boats has an inter-generational story to tell. They were handcrafted in a time when we still made things with our hands. Some carried across oceans some were traders serving communities up and down our coasts. They were our transport and our recreation.

The Melbourne Boat Show is back for its 61st year. This year there will be a “Heritage and Wooden Boat Precinct” Hosted by the Boating Industry Association of Victoria (BIAV) over four days in the heart of the city, at Docklands.

Well, at the recent AWBF annual General meeting Joy stepped down so that she could spend more time with two of the most important things in her life…Her family and her stunning Neilson Ketch HOLGER DANSKE

The Timber Boat Festival provides a great opportunity to welcome people aboard your boat and enjoy their enthusiasm for timber boat craftsmanship and share in the camaraderie of fellow timber boat owners.

“I have in mind to admit it all to the New York Yacht Club that I really owe the secret of the design to a Greek guy who helped me out and was invaluable. He’s been dead for 2,000 years. Bloody Archimedes…”

The Grand Parade, led by the drum of dragon boats and the sails of a tall ship, invites all boats to the water, spiriting all vessels past a crowd of thousands waving from the foreshore.

But we weren’t going to South Australia for art, landscapes and wine, we were going to experience the 17th biennial South Australian Wooden Boat Festival held in Goolwa near the mouth of the Murray. I was looking forward to understanding a little bit about the particular craft of the area and how they relate the idiosyncratic geography of the region.

Just in case you are still dreaming of that weekend three weeks ago, the AWBF has put together a three minute video montage covering all the action from in an around the Hobart Waterside.

While we came away with enough content to keep these pages filled for a month or two, this week we choose instead to simply share some images from an unforgettable four days.

The chosen social media platform at SWS is instagram… so here are nine feeds that should be covering the AWBF event if you can’t make it in person. There’s plenty of existing content from their journeys to the festival and hopefully plenty of imagery to come from Hobart

Any musical genre will be considered. Jim’s especially looking to find a jazz/blues piano player to take on melodica duties but he’s also hoping to see bagpipes, bush ballads, bosa nova, bebop and blues - perhaps not all at the same time!

Most Unique Boat was awarded to Roger Patterson’s PEGGY OF TWEED. An open canoe  stern launch, that was built by her owner Roger in 2022 in Pottsville, NSW.