From her early days PISCES worked from Apollo Bay, venturing into Bass Strait for shark fishing and netting. After a stint at a few other Victorian west coast ports, she was eventually taken to Queensland where she was used as a vessel for fishing the black tipped reef shark.

Wally Ward was perhaps the last truly ‘amateur’ designer to have one of his boats win the Sydney-Hobart race and also one of the most successful designers to use the metacentric shelf principle.

The portraits will become an evolving display at the Festival with each participant invited to find their image amongst the sea of faces and handwrite on their print what wooden boat custodianship means to them.

Every craft has a few special items that define the character of the vessel and its owners. They add to the moth-eaten brocade of history that is every old wooden boat

In many ways it was like a traditional four-day Sydney Hobart Yacht Race squeezed into just three hours.

TARKINE, is a 40ft Pilot Cutter inspired design by Paul Gartside, and she’s starting to come together in away that gives the viewer an understanding of how this elegant craft is going to look and function.

Recently the clever people at the Queenscliffe Maritime Museum, in conjunction with the Queenscliff Literature Festival received over 600 suggestions in response to a rather unusual competition. The aim? To find a word to describe a group of lighthouses. In other words the competition sought to find an official collective noun.

After years of building a dinghy collection, Tony now wants to develop a place to celebrate these boats, the people who built and sailed them and the Swan River environment itself.

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Consider an extended excursions aboard the beautiful MARGARET PEARL promising excitement and adventure, (and a touch of comfort!) in Victoria and Tasmania’s southern waters.

And along the way, we’ve met people like you who appreciate the craft, relish in the history and simple enjoy the stories and beautiful images that seem to turn up in their inbox on a weekly basis…Jokes and melancholia aside - here’s the BUT - we really need your help.

Wally Ward designed a well-known series of yachts in Sydney over a period of 30 years from 1937 to 1965. His first yacht JANAWAY paved the way with her perfect hull balance and unmatched performance for her size.

At no point up until now has it seemed unusual to send a rowing boat half way around the world to an unfamiliar, developing country, only to row it back home. But now I understand; it puts a smile on my face.

Barnett was determined to regain his Australian title and his design of Myra Too created a boat exceptionally suited to Sydney Harbour conditions and, along with a powerful Marconi-rigged big sail, had good, all round speed in any conditions.

Here’s the second part of our review of a terrific book Albert Park Yacht Club 150 Years on the Lake. We’ve picked out a few portraits and stories of people and boats that characterise a Rather special club.

This week we discover for you, four interesting options combining a love of timber boats with an unapologetically indulgent sailing holiday. And not a flotilla in sight!

The Tancook Whaler is one of those boats which evolved over many decades to do a particular working job, in this case to fish off the rough coast of Nova Scotia in all weathers and which at the same time took on a shape which is a thing of beauty. They were fast and seaworthy and kept on moorings off the rocky coast all year round.

I’m sitting at 35,000ft, watching Tucci devour sardines, the place he visited next, grabs my attending – there on a rocky beach, a ‘boat graveyard’ – a sandbank of discarded, impounded wooden boats, makeshift craft, roughly hammered together, cut down from bigger craft, wooden boats used by migrants crossing the waters from Africa.

Dylan’s reaction when he first heard what happened was, perhaps not surprisingly, pretty sanguine.

“Man…it’s like that reef has been sitting there waiting for you since the very beginning.”

The late Bob Gordon was just 16 years old when he launched his first hand built wooden boat. He went on to build around 30 classic craft over the next 67 years.

Got a wooden boat? Why not bring your pride and joy? It will be four years since the last Festival, and the AWBF crew are excited to open the flood gates for registrations.