The brownie box camera seen on deck may have been an aide memoir- that diary we all carry around with us. All this when the curve of the earth prevented a view of the city skyline from Mornington harbour.

This is going to be expensive and drawn out. Numbers at this stage are guesstimates, but market chatter suggests insurers should be very pleased if they can keep payouts much below $1bn.

Hope that they will not drag, hope that they will enable the vessel to survive the storms that threaten it, and hope that they can successfully be used to kedge the vessel off of the reef or sand bar she has grounded on before the waves break her back.

Staying on top of the SWS inbox is time consuming, but rewarding. Much of the correspondence covers interesting gems of information, perhaps not substantial enough for a stand alone article, but definitely worth sharing.

Suppose that you are a fisherman from several centuries past. You have built your boat, sewn her sails and made her cordage. The Land Breeze/Sea Breeze fact-set allows you to go out to sea in the morning with the wind at your back—sailing large, a point of sail also known as a Soldier’s Wind. In this case the land breeze.

In the course of its existence, the forecast has saved thousands of lives but its practical application has long been superseded by more precise meteorological and satellite data: the forecast is said to be around 93 per cent accurate. Hence, the vast majority of its remaining 6.5mn listeners today are landlubbers, tucked up safe on dry land.

Three wood specimens were tested and showed no deformation after space exposure," the researchers said in a statement in May. "Despite the extreme environment of outer space involving significant temperature changes and exposure to intense cosmic rays and dangerous solar particles for 10 months, tests confirmed no decomposition or deformations, such as cracking, warping, peeling or surface damage.

The closure of our current location means the end of The Victorian Wooden Boat Centre as we know it. There will never be another opportunity to recreate what we have here and keep it viable. We will wind down the VWBC until its lease ends, at which point it will close permanently.

You look out onto the vistas of forests, or plains or desert and absorb their stillness and beauty, taking it all into your heart and mind. This is made easier if you are horseback or in the company of a good dog.

HOANA, like most old wooden boats, has a tenuous monetary value. Humanity's notions of progress place little value on the thousand-year-old particles in her veins, even less on her vanished forest ancestry.

“A laser is focused inside a droplet that locally hardens in the focal spot of the laser,” said researcher Daniela Kraft. “By moving the laser through the droplet in a controlled way, we can write the swimmer shape that we want.”

A heritage craft is considered to be viable if there are sufficient craftspeople to transmit the craft skills to the next generation. The four categories are “Extinct in the UK”, “Critically Endangered”, “Endangered” and “Currently Viable”

Brooks’ research in Japan focuses on the techniques and design secrets of the craft. These techniques have been passed from master to apprentice with almost no written record.

This is your last chance to get your hands on a copy of Andrew’s old school, analogue (!) Calendar for 2024, featuring his photographs of Australia’s wooden craft.

This week we seem to have accumulated a locker full of small items that we thought we should clear out, by putting them all into one big news post.

A few motorised tourist junks with fixed sails still confuse the credulous but – much like other endlessly recycled Hong Kong clichés – the obsolete sailing junk icon is decades beyond having any genuine symbolic purpose.

Long ago, beyond the mists of history, even before the Hobie Cat, an idea was born. It was found to be good and so it moved upon the face of the waters, at least in Southern California.

Many of those isolated hamlets are most easily accessible by boat rather than car, so in 1959, a group of librarians secured government funding to launch a waterborne library service with a special emphasis on children’s literature.

“Without their regular feasts, the faithful are unstrung from the calendar, awash in a sea of days that are all the same.”
― Hilary Mantel,

Maritime and terrestrial navigation requires two-dimensional coordinates. Once in the air a third coordinate comes into play — altitude. It was Gatty’s research and practical application that led to a solution to many of the complex problems associated with three-dimensional navigation.