Wooden Boat Festival

The Wooden Boat Festival in Hobart has grown to be a huge and interesting gathering for all devotees of wooden boats and the care and use of the same. It is remarkable to see the variety of boats built from wood all in the same place. From small dinghies and sculls to 100 ft launches and yachts, they were all there for us to contemplate and admire. We spent two days on the waterfront checking out all of the exhibits and admiring the finish on so many of the boats. Having a wooden boat of our own, we were able to appreciate the amount of work required to keep a wooden boat looking so good. Two weeks before coming to Tasmania, we had been sanding down the hull of our own boat and antifouling. It is amazing how much bigger a boat looks out of the water when you are sanding it to when it is floating. It is a very big job and seems endless as once the hull is done, then you need to start on the deck, or the cabin. Wooden boats are a far cry from my usual beading pursuits, but still involve painstaking care for detail and helping my DH to antifoul has been a regular part of life for quite a few years. I am so glad ours is a relatively small boat and not one of the huge boats we saw in Hobart. I certainly wouldn't want to be trying to do all the maintainance work on one of them with just the two of us.