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?

Emotional Storytelling - The meta-communication of the clip, characters and setting, shapes how people connect with it - Hoana’s birthday provided a story, the Rally participants, the Sydney Harbour sailing, the representation of her young crew and the snippets of history provided by the interview against the backdrop of a historic clubhouse satisfied the criteria of emotional storytelling - we can claim success on that one.

As always with these things, the story that needs to be told is primarily about the people who worked and maintained these craft, and then the appreciation and admiration for the boats will follow. With that in mind here are three beautiful short archival films from around the world, that evocatively remind us that the roots of our passion are labour not leisure.

But it was the loss of the 370-ton ship Edward Lombe in 1834 twenty three years before the Dunbar disaster - that led the authorities to do something to warn mariners of the reef and its dangers.

The Police Report reads - “saw floating in the water the left arm of a human being, which had apparently been wrenched from the body at the shoulder joint. We retrieved the arm from the water and on examining it found that it had two large incised wounds on the upper and lower parts respectively. We also found that on the inside forearm there was a tattoo mark of two men in the fighting attitude.

The Regatta courses took participants to Manly for the Friday, Saturday and Sunday races. Each day, with a lot of east in the breeze and big tides, decisions taken on which side of the harbour to work shaped the results and helped a lot of others decide what they will do next time.

With her distinctive raised deck, pretty canoe stern and unique shear strake, CARESS is the epitome of a truly classic design from a past era.

Reality check No.1: this is on an island that is a public reserve administered and maintained by the taxpayer-funded National Parks and Wildlife Service. Anyone has a right to be there.

The boat would be made at home by a boy and his dad and would be inexpensive to construct (in the 1930s the boat cost 5 pounds 7 shillings and sixpence, and the sails cost 3 pounds 5 shillings).

There was plenty of gambling action on Bradley’s Head with bookmakers mingling among the crowd.  Unlike the bookies on the ferries, the Bradley’s Head bookies also had plenty of warning if the police were seen by one of the punters.  

As I later found out, this was the first boat built in Australia by a young Danish shipwright Anders Johansen, who, after teaming up with his uncle John Hald, built more than 30 yachts over 8 or so years in Sydney in the ‘60’s

As we move towards the 2021-2022 season, it’s a good time to remember how the ‘League’ began and how the original club administrators generated the enormous public support that has endured.