So the solution to managing the perils of social media is to be strict with the inputs. Regular culling of the feed is cathartic. It’s like putting out the bins on a Thursday evening… a bit of a hassle, but it feels good when its done.

A quick scan of the images shows that 13 are of wooden or “traditional” craft, so lets call it 16%. My unscientific gut feeling suggests that about 1% of all yacht racing would be done in these sort of craft so in a sense classic boats are rewardingly over represented.

Hengam Island is a tropical isle off the coast of Iran, at the southern end of the Persian Gulf. Just fourteen square miles, it has three villages with only a few hundred families. The island has long been recognized for its geostrategic importance. Nearchus, the Greek explorer and admiral of Alexander the Great’s naval fleet, referenced it when he navigated the Gulf in the fourth century B.C. Hengam was occupied by the Portuguese military in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1913, Britain established a naval base there. Since the late nineteen-forties, tanker ships have skirted Hengam en route to the Strait of Hormuz, a global choke point about thirty-seven miles away. A fifth of the world’s supply of oil and natural gas passes through it each day.

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.

Five artists interpret the remote cool South, taking in Ernest Shackleton’s failed yet epic Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-1917) to the Weddell and Ross seas, and modern-day South Georgia in the South Atlantic Ocean, where the climate crisis has glaciers on the run and biodiversity experts worried

Of the eighty images in the initial selection, eight are loosely of traditional/timber boats. This is down by two, from our unscientific survey in 2022. Interestingly twenty of the eighty images are of foiling boats. Is this the writing on the wall?

A serious of photographs from a month aboard a wooden boat.

Of the eighty images in the selection, nine of them relate to classic or wooden craft. This reinforces my belief that while traditional sailing craft may not be at the cutting edge of sailboat racing, they play an important role in upholding the values of authenticity and custodianship throughout the whole of the panoply of sailing.

So we have Andrew’s interpretation of reality rather than reality itself. His feelings and emotions are woven through these pictures like threads in a tapestry. This is not something a documentary photographer does lightly. It throws your work wide open to judgement.

The boats themselves are the sculptures…. but sometimes too much “trickery” shouts “look at me, the clever photographer” rather than look at this image and understand a little of what it is like to witness this awe-inspiring sight.

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.

Its rich, and informative, and unlike most coffee table books (I hate that term!) has a substance that makes it cherishable and unlikely to end up on the nature strip on hard rubbish day.