The News, Culture and Practice of Sailing woodenboats
in Australia, New Zealand & The South Pacific.

FLOTSAM Mark Chew FLOTSAM Mark Chew

Dying For a New Life

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.

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FLOTSAM Mark Chew FLOTSAM Mark Chew

Home Harbour

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?

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FLOTSAM Mark Chew FLOTSAM Mark Chew

Radical Rule Change and Starting Afresh

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.

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FLOTSAM Mark Chew FLOTSAM Mark Chew

SWS in 2025

So far this year, 116,000 individual people have visited the SWS website and they have read 187,000 pages. I point this out not to be self congratulatory, but indicate the strength and size of the community that sees the value in promoting traditional maritime culture.

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FLOTSAM Mark Chew FLOTSAM Mark Chew

Curating the Feed

So the solution to managing the perils of social media is to be strict with the inputs. Regular culling of the feed is cathartic. It’s like putting out the bins on a Thursday evening… a bit of a hassle, but it feels good when its done.

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