Halvorsen boats hold a special place in the hearts of many Australians. Halvorsens were renowned for their innovative design, quality vessels, and distinctive styling.

Browsing the Australian Wooden Boat Festival Program it’s hard not to be impressed with variety and quality of the eleven vessels that carry the “Tall Ship” moniker. If you are planning to be down in Hobart for the Festival consider getting onboard one of these awesome craft!

The paddler, a small young man, with well-defined muscles, nimbly guides the fragile little craft back from the mother boat, having loaded up with ice, fuel, and charcoal, the necessities for a successful outing. His “oneness” with the boat hints at generations of seafaring ancestors.

You have to give Nutting credit: he lived, and ultimately died, adhering to his anti-safety credo, insisting to the end that the true purpose of ocean sailing was simply “the fun of the thing.”

Michael writes with same restrained intensity that I imagine he sails with. He oozes authority and I hang on every word! His track record in the race is extraordinary, and the boat was showing remarkable pace before being forced to withdraw in 2024. But most of all you have to admire his vision in seeing the potential for success in a 120 year old double ender.

In 2010, the club was dealt a blow when its club HQ and sometime trophy cabinet was destroyed in a covert operation by Parks Management. The stump was cleared away. Committee members spent some months meandering haplessly from pub to pub in search of a suitable venue for meetings.

Leiv Poncet’s remarkable solo voyages over the past 25 years include his circumnavigation of the Southern Ocean, voyages from the Falkland Islands to the Aleutian Islands, and remarkable, first-ever, high latitude sea-kayaking trips.  His sailing achievements are further highlighted by his use of the 38-foot steel sloop, Peregrine, a French Trireme model, which has taken him to places like South Georgia and beyond.

The Center will house one of the nation’s most important private collections of materials and photographs related to wooden boat and ship design, construction, and history. Photographer Benjamin Mendlowitz has contributed his entire slide collection, comprising a staggering 155,000 images spanning 1979 to 2005, to the Friend Memorial Public Library's Maritime Research Center.

If you are reading this then the chances are you are part of something that’s bigger than you imagine. The wooden boat world by nature self depreciatory. It’s an admirable characteristic to understate, to play down, in a world where the unjustified hyperbole often drowns out the the quiet achievers.

The first Rainbow to be built in Victoria in close to fifty years was officially launched at the Western Beach Boat Club, itself a hidden treasure tucked away at the western end of the Geelong waterfront. Rainbow class yachts first appealed to youngsters because they could build one themselves, they were fast and thrilling to sail, cheap to build, and safe with good buoyancy compartments.

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.

Owners have banded together to salvage, buy, restore, maintain and race the D’s, as they are called. They’ve found boats from as far afield as Burnie, Launceston, the Tasman Peninsula, even Sydney. They believe 18 still exist of the 26 or so that were built.

In the late 90s Jim decided that he wanted to get back into sailing mullet boats in which his family had great tradition.  He bought Tamatea and press ganged his sons and a couple of other likely starters as crew.

The Halvorsen brothers Magnus and Trygve competed in most of the Sydney Hobart Races from 1946 to 1965 in their own designed and built boats, and won the event on handicap five times with Solveig, Anitra V and Freya.

The vast Pacific Ocean covers one third of the world’s surface, and the story of its exploration and settlement is an epic tale of human endeavour. The three key speakers are a fascinating mix…

The Classic Yacht Association's annual Patio Bay Race saw tricky conditions after the start with a breeze yet to fill in. Forecast to come from the north it never arose, and instead filled in from the west giving those with running kites a chance to stretch their legs. Some great sights off Awawaroa with RAWHITI and ARIKI having a ding dong battle.

When they were about 60 miles off the port of Stad on Norway's west coast, they encountered rough conditions with waves of up to 15 feet. The crew sent a mayday at about 1800 hours Tuesday evening, according to Norwegian authorities, and a helicopter was dispatched to the scene. The aircrew found that the boat was not in distress and had issued a false alarm, according to Norwegian media. 

These boats have an inherent integrity because they are are shaped by the vernacular of their allotted challenging task. Even as the pilot cutters of Western England (or the Couta boats of Port Phillip) have become pleasure craft, they have carried with them an honesty of design that is missing from boats shaped purely by the need for speed, or more recently, three double cabins and two heads.

It is, of course, inevitable that the conduct of offshore racing will adopt new communications technology. But by dispensing with the radio relay vessel and the traditional position reporting system the Sydney-Hobart will lose an important component of the sense of community and comradeship that has helped make the event unique.

Bassett was a forceful and decisive character who found it hard to tolerate foolishness, but was forgiving of ignorance. The uninformed he set out to educate, lucidly and patiently. He had an uncanny knack of grasping the salient problems and of solving them at the outset.