Now I’m not a shipwright and I’m certainly not an an academic, so my knowledge of dhows is anecdotal, coming only from talking with the craftsmen and sailors (in broken Swahili/English) and spending a few days, joyously racing on the lateen rigged flying machines.

Plying a small corner of the Western Hemisphere, Haitian sailing craft must surely represent one of the simplest and most successful designs in history, having changed little since their presumed introduction to Haiti by French colonizers in the early 18th century.

Statistics will show that this article will get very few “reads” unless I substitute the heading with the words “FREE BOAT!” And fair enough, because people don’t come to SWS for a dose of political and social reality. But there are plenty of small things we can do in our daily lives to try to reduce the frequency of these ongoing tragedies.

We put out word that applications would be closing early, thinking there was still runway. Turns out crystal balls are unreliable. Just as things looked like they might be leveling off, another surge came roaring through the pipes. Time to close up shop. And yeah – it’s really closed.

Silk, Strange, Volunteer, Charm, Cyprus. These and lots more in this week’s news

The current Front Runner is the PT11. I’ve rather fallen in love with this 11-foot nesting sailing dinghy designed by American naval architect Paul Bieker. It splits into two interlocking halves so would stow nicely on MATILDA’s deck. Once assembled, it becomes a lightweight, planing sailing dinghy.

In essence you have joined a club, the clubhouse is the Harbour itself. The club was originally founded by the worlds oldest living culture whose conjuring chants sent reverberations flying far across still waters as rattling boomerangs told Ancestral stories on calm nights. Time and tide wait for no man. The Harbour sits and waits implacably, Club members come and go. Stories are the Club constant. The thread began with the First Nations thousands of years ago and continues today. Stories told and retold, memories savoured, accounts with and without absolute meanings, yarns bordering on the absurd; ancestral histories, all perhaps worth saving?

“The very first cruise in the Sioux II, I took my wife Joan, and the three kids, around to Westernport Bay. We had no radio, no life raft, no lifelines, and no motor, and we went out the Port Phillip Heads on the full ebb tide! Just out into Bass Strait, we were caught in a violent South-westerly change, with rain squalls that blotted out the land. I had an aircraft compass that a friend had given me but I hadn’t fitted. There I was at the tiller with the compass between my knees trying to steer a course that would get us past Cape Schanck.

Boats for Sale, films to watch, people to farewell, festivals to visit. News from around the region this February.

Ron decided to avoid the local police and set out from Apollo Bay. He worked out that police jurisdiction ended a little off shore so he organised for a local fisherman tow the boat a few miles out and them he jumped aboard. He set off in a nice Northerly breeze with friends on a yacht following him for safety. The trip went smoothly to start with, heading for Grassy on King Island, then the breeze turned SW & increased.

Although almost all the nooks and crannies of the marine leisure industry are saturated with inventions and gadgets and gizmos, one area seems to be severely lacking in innovation. Small, lightweight, non-inflatable sailing tenders.

Majestic A-class yachts with B-Class and K-Class beauties. Classic launches and old-school work boats, and a treasured restored scow. An Australian ‘Couta’ boat, a converted fishing trawler, cruising boats with stories to tell, and passage yachts that have been the places dreams are made. Iconic racing legends from decades past, and just about every rig configuration you can imagine.

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.