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.

They trudged home at dusk through the tea-tree scrub with their pikau (a sack-backpack) heavy with gum. On the flats, gum was found two to six feet down; in the swamps, as deep as twelve. Experienced diggers sometimes struck rich veins — but more often, the earth yielded little.

“We had a great three days of Classic Yacht racing on Sydney Harbour. We seem to have established a tradition of sailors in beautiful boats enjoying the company of others enjoying the same thing. I’m already looking forward to the next one.”

SWS was present at that first Festival based in Jellicoe Harbour and there is no way we are going to miss out on edition two!
We invite you to join us to experience the celebration of Pacific Maritime Culture and extraordinary food and wine, all set in one of the world’s great harbour cities. Airbnb still has over 1000 properties available for the dates and return air flights from Sydney or Melbourne are still under $600. So what’s stopping you?

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.

But the distaste for rhyme goes back further than that. Early modernist poets like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein reacted strongly against Victorian and Edwardian verse, where rhyme was often predictable and ornamental, and they argued that it encouraged poets to choose words for sound rather than for accuracy or emotional truth. Free verse came to stand for honesty, immediacy, and a closer fit between thought and language

This week’s sailing stories from around the web and the world.

The racing was tight and thrilling, even if the give way rules were unclear. Doing about nine knots we wove in and out of the local craft going about their daily business, and by the bottom mark we were coming third. When, on the first beat, the boat sailing just to windward of us shattered its boom sending splinters onto our deck, we moved into second.