With registrations due to open later this month for the 2025 Australian Wooden Boat Festival, we thought it might be a good time to have a chat with the Festival Director and General Manager Paul Stephanus about his philosophy on the event, why you should make the effort to attend and the process for registering your boat.

As the name suggests, the rally is held on the main waterfront of Paynesville on the edge of the beautiful Gippsland’s Lakes with McMillan Straight separating Paynesville from Raymond Island, a five-minute, 150m ferry ride away. Raymond Island has a famous koala colony to its name.

OK, the forecast wasn’t great. Four days of temperatures in the high 30’s with either gusty northerlies or no wind at all. But as a wise sailor friend of mine constantly reminds me … “ITS JUST A FORECAST!”

Wooden Boat Festivals are strange ritualistic occasions. Beautiful (and occasionally not so beautiful) craft gather in one spot, flaunting their curvaceous bodies, and sparkling varnished jewels in the bursts of sunshine, as crowds mill around the pontoons, pontificating on the worthiness and attributes of each vessel

Six engaging speaker sessions will take place each day at the Maritime Museum, with films playing on rotation all weekend long. All are invited to join the celebration! Entry is free but bookings are recommended.

Here are the details of seven upcoming diverse wooden boat festivals… Whether you are in Victoria, NSW, Tasmania, Queensland or Auckland, there’s a celebration to get involved with. The pulse of our special field of interest seems to be beating a little more strongly!

Whether you are custodian of a much loved family dinghy, have just finished building your first kayak, are restoring a traditional Tassie cray boat, or are mad for sailing among other timber boats, this is your weekend to head down to the beautiful D'Entrecasteaux Channel on, or with, your wooden boat.

Each of these boats has an inter-generational story to tell. They were handcrafted in a time when we still made things with our hands. Some carried across oceans some were traders serving communities up and down our coasts. They were our transport and our recreation.

Well, at the recent AWBF annual General meeting Joy stepped down so that she could spend more time with two of the most important things in her life…Her family and her stunning Neilson Ketch HOLGER DANSKE

The Grand Parade, led by the drum of dragon boats and the sails of a tall ship, invites all boats to the water, spiriting all vessels past a crowd of thousands waving from the foreshore.

But we weren’t going to South Australia for art, landscapes and wine, we were going to experience the 17th biennial South Australian Wooden Boat Festival held in Goolwa near the mouth of the Murray. I was looking forward to understanding a little bit about the particular craft of the area and how they relate the idiosyncratic geography of the region.

Just in case you are still dreaming of that weekend three weeks ago, the AWBF has put together a three minute video montage covering all the action from in an around the Hobart Waterside.

While we came away with enough content to keep these pages filled for a month or two, this week we choose instead to simply share some images from an unforgettable four days.

Most Unique Boat was awarded to Roger Patterson’s PEGGY OF TWEED. An open canoe  stern launch, that was built by her owner Roger in 2022 in Pottsville, NSW.

Given the difficulties in travel and transport over the last few years, the festival organisers made a cleaver decision for 2023, to highlight Australian designers and builders and with the release of the full program on line, we can now see how they are intending to do this.

For those of us lucky enough to be attending next years festival, the live symposium provides a level of scholarship and intellect rarely applied to the world of wooden boats. The program is now out!

Former Chair of the AWBF, Peter Higgs once described the Festival as an elephant on roller skates, zooming down a hill. In the words of the current General Manager Paul Stephanus… “Well, we are are now almost seven months out from the big day, and the beast is well and truly picking up momentum.“

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.

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.

Wooden boats were and still are a common feature in Tasmania, an island surrounded by water. Sharing the knowledge surrounding the wooden boat craft is a big feature for the Australian Wooden Boat Festival.