The Wooden Boat Shop is an Accredited Training Facility for apprentices in Marine Trades and over the years has trained around 50 shipwrights.

Have you cooked lunch for the Queen aboard a super yacht? While backpacking around Europe did you happen to spend a summer working in a lighthouse in the Scilly Isles? Perhaps you’ve worked as a rigger on a tall ship or have an unusual story of restoring a Viking Longship for a museum in Oslo.

Last Wednesday on the ABC’s “Art Show” there was in interview with Gemma Rasdall. She not only lives on a boat on Pittwater but works as an artist painting on Scotland Island often using old sailcloth as her canvass.

It's not often that you come across a seventy year old, 30ft yacht that’s been around the world. The story of MAORI LASS has some great history but it also has some large blank chapters waiting to be filled by a yachting sleuth with the time and inclination to fill in the gaps.

I feel myself go white just as Greg texts me an image of MARCO POLO still on its mooring but submerged almost down to the gunnels.

Cheoy Lee yachts have legions of fans and associations around the world. They are always advertised as a Cheoy Lee Robb or a Cheoy Lee Rhodes etc. and devotees are prepared to pay a premium. So what’s going on?

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

In the latest episode of the AWBF Boat Folk series they introduce you to one of Tasmania's oldest wooden boats - proud SV BRITANNIA.

Credit where credit is due and a great opportunity to work with a great team!

Last Saturday the 118 year old ALMA DOEPEL was lifted back into the murky waters of the River Yarra after a 10 year restoration. In this film we speak with Ferdi Darley the amazing and articulate head shipwright on the project just four days before the launch.

It’s so invaluable to have these cross hemisphere connections… so when I saw this great little story which covers all the things we at SWS feel are so important, youth involvement, environmental custodianship and female participation, then we felt we had to republish. And surely this is the worlds best looking sewage barge!

Reading Bill Cole’s reminiscences of Tumlaren “ELISABETH” which Bill owned in Auckland during the early to mid-1960s ignited a dream that Kiwi shipwright Phil (Blue) Holmes had kindled for some time to do up another Tumlaren.

“The final tally - twenty two years dreaming, three years courtship, four months work, six dozen beers, 40 pies, 2 sanders, five rolls of sand paper, fourteen brushes, twelve rollers, two pairs of overalls, one iPhone dropped twice from the scaffold, much profanity, lots of advice, unexpected help from great people and in the end a beautiful boat.”

Summer is coming, lockdowns are ending…time to get out on the water one way or another. Based on the theory that the pleasure to be gained from a boat is inversely proportional to its length…. here are five classic little wooden boats, all under 5 meters long, and all currently on the market.

With the recent dramatic change of thinking on Australia’s next Submarine fleet, It’s apposite to look back a hundred years and perhaps learn something from history….

Len Heffernan was a champion 18ft skiff skipper, designer and boat builder of the 1950s and 60s, who changed the style of the Sydney 18 footers in the early 1960s, but never gets the recognition that he deserves.

A surreal year it certainly was, although, if you are going to be locked down, it might as well be in a cosy workshop with a pile of plywood to scarph and a roll of lovely Oughtred drawings. The reality of what a world pandemic meant hit home most when epoxy paint became unobtainable in the colour white.

“Yay rich people doing a totally non-scalable thing to make themselves feel better!”…. OR….. “The human race is doomed to destroy our home, but it's better to go out trying to effect positive change than to throw up our hands in embittered despair.”

Dreams sometimes overpower reality. Lyle Hess understood that, and he didn’t want one of his wooden boats to be the cause of unhappiness. "I warn people, 'Don't build a boat if it's beyond your means, or if it's going to cause family trouble.

The truism that product lifetime “ain’t what she used to be many long years ago” is underscored by the Navy’s decision to fork out an eye-watering $90++billion on subs having a service life only ten years longer than its build-time.