Any movement needs its purists; people who consider “epoxy” to be a dirty word, and are happy to rinse their cotton sails in seawater every time it rains. Most of us sit nearer the middle of the spectrum enjoying and admiring the best values and aesthetics of traditional looking craft, but appreciate a watertight hull and push button navigation more than a slavish devotion to outdated techniques.

Whats going on in the wooden boat world in February?

This week, the program for the second ever Auckland Wooden Boat Festival (13 - 15 March) came out…and it looks pretty special. As with all good Festivals, planning your long weekend is key to getting the most out of it. And the beauty of the Auckland venue is that everything is only a few minutes walk away.

It’s a relationship that can only add to the combined cultural wealth of the wooden boat communities in this part of the world. It looks like there is going to be a sizeable contingent arriving from the big Island, for the event (13–15 March) including the small but mighty team from SWS who will be presenting at the symposium and covering everything else going on on the Waitemata.

If the dinner party is getting a little dull, and you are not feeling enriched by drunken theories on how to fix American Politics, then throw this question into the mix…

“What single rule change could you introduce to a mainstream sport to make a radical improvement?” It turns out that even the most socially radical people, can be extreme in their conservatism, when it comes to their favourite sport. Change is evil and only to be considered in desperate times.

With a focus on the surprising, the strange, and the beautiful, we hope to provide an ever-growing cabinet of curiosities for the digital age, a kind of hyperlinked Wunderkammer – an archive of content which truly celebrates the breadth and diversity of our shared cultural commons and the minds that have made it.

This weeks wooden news from World and the Web.

One weekend, as we were looking for an adventure, it occurred to me that an activity on water, that’s been going on for over 500 years, probably involved wooden boats. So we rugged up and climbed aboard our bicycles and cycled south.

As with all wooden working boats the "albuferenc" boats (or "barcas" as they are know locally), have been designed by their function and environment, rather than individual people. They are flat-bottomed allowing them to work in for the shallow waters of the lagoon and the canals running between rice fields and they're quite different from the heavier fishing boats once used used along the Mediterranean coast and on the beaches just a few miles to the east of the lagoon.

This weeks news from India, Oman, Paris, Inverloch, Bass Strait and Kangaroo Point!

That is where Wilcox’s work leaves you with more questions than answers. For all the clarity of his paintings and posters, the man himself remains oddly elusive. There is surprisingly little personal material to go on. No memoir. Few anecdotes. No easy sense of how he lived when he wasn’t working. Did he own a boat? Did he enjoy sailing, or was the sea something he mostly observed from shore and dockside? What did he drive? A person’s car often tells you something about them, but even that detail seems to have slipped away.

So why would one of Australia’s most reputable Museums decide to add to its collection a particular example of these identical, simple, plastic dinghies? It’s because the boat in question was sailed by Australian Matt Wearn

Each example gives a peculiar insight into the problem, indicating how the waste got there in the first place, what can be done about it and who is and should be taking on the responsibility for cleaning it up.

Personally, he was known as blunt, stubborn, and immensely productive. He worked fast, trusted his eye, and was not prone to second-guessing himself. Clients who wanted radical innovation often went elsewhere; clients who wanted a boat that would bring them home in ugly weather sought out Garden.

Realistically a baby born today in Australia will, if they live to be 85, spend about a 28-30 years of their life sleeping. That’s ok…sleep is good! They will then spend around 28-30 years doing all the normal things that people get do when they are awake like eating, driving, sport, exercise and socialising… but perhaps most worryingly they will also spend a solid 22-28 years staring at a screen.

This weeks news from Australia, Africa, France, England and other places!

Families used to find different ways of passing time when forced to spend hours together on long car journeys or waiting in airports for delayed flights. Nowadays we mostly just stare at our phones, but we are poorer for the technology.

His dedication to building or modifying his yachts to the simple junk rig and proving their seaworthiness has been inspirational to a yachting community of minimalists who find it most important to be at sea or with a community of like-minded sailors.His independent philosophy of design and construction has allowed him to sail the world’s oceans without the burden of sophisticated and expensive systems.

That said, observing the race from 10,000 nautical miles away does give a degree of objectivity, that is sometimes lost in the hurly burly of holiday time Australian sports coverage. So I’ll take the plunge and give you (in no particular order) half a dozen of my personal take aways from the 2025 Sydney Hobart Yacht Race…  and yes, of course its all seen through the distorted lens of traditional sailing values!

She ultimately came into the ownership of Don and Tim Armitage. Geoff, a Salthouse-trained boatbuilder, and a team took on the project. It was just in time as Arcturus was in a very bad state. Working from Alden’s original plans, a 15,000-hour restoration commenced. The hull was stripped, the ballast keel removed and flipped! Carvel planked yellow pine with iron fastenings had no future so major structure planking was replaced with kauri and laminated floors. 

Starting the new year with a few sailing related stories from around the web and the world.