1 Year in Under 8 Minutes, our latest YouTube video, has got some serious momentum on the platform, so if you haven’t seen it yet, we think it’s worth the watch, If you have — THANK YOU! — send it to someone who still thinks we’re joking about the hand-building such a big boat.

Condensing the past 12 months of boat building in to an eight minute video was no easy feat — we have documented the entire journey so far and it was tough to leave out footage. The goal was to create a time-lapse vibe, highlighting the build so far and our process, without going too much in to the technical side of things (we do that in our full length episodes and you can watch these in the boat build playlist on our channel).

While I have you here, I want to walk you through our membership programs including some important updates. A lot of you reading this are here for the free Substack posts, so before anything else — here's the full picture of how to become an FSL member, in case you didn't know the opportunity existed or have been meaning to look into it.

Website & Substack membership

This is the core of FSL membership — direct support for the boat, our citizen science projects, and the storytelling around it all, with three tiers depending on how involved you want to be:

• Solidarity Pass — €20/year. For anyone who feels aligned with the journey and wants to show quiet support, wherever they are.

• Crew Pass — €50/year (also available right here as a paid Substack subscription). Full membership: exclusive content access, plus priority when we open applications for residencies and future sailing voyages.

• Explorer Pass — €150/year (also available here as our Founding Member tier). Everything in Crew Pass, plus €50 of your membership sponsors a young person’s place in an underwater freediving excursion with local ocean woman, Lea Brassy.

Learn More & Sign Up

Prefer to give without committing to a tier? A one-time donation is always an option too. And if you're already a Crew or Explorer Pass member, either through the website or as a paid subscriber here — thank you, and nothing about your membership is changing.

Make a One-Time Donation

Prefer to donate tools and kit? We also keep a running gift registry for the build, citizen science, and storytelling. You can purchase directly online and ship to us here in Brittany — screws, tools, or camera kit.

Gift Registry

New: FSL Voyager on YouTube

We were recently accepted into YouTube’s membership program, and we’ve set up a single tier: FSL Voyager, €2.99/month. It gets you a loyalty badge and custom emoji in comments and chat, members-only Shorts, and access to occasional YouTube-exclusive live streams — informal, behind-the-scenes stuff.

FSL Voyager is a small, YouTube-native way to support us if that’s where you already spend your time watching, but it isn’t a replacement for our FSL’s Crew or Explorer Pass, it’s simply a different door into supporting the same project, built for a different platform.

YouTube

We haven’t launched community livestreams on any platform, yet, but when we do, the ones that are really for our Crew and Explorer Pass members (including paid Substack subscribers!) aren't going to require FSL Voyager to attend. When we launch live streams, we will share the link directly with all our paying members beforehand and you’ll be able to opt-in to these more intimate streams where we can answer all your questions and share real-time updates and milestones.

Introducing Café du Port

One more new thing, and I am really excited about this: a community video hangout for FSL members, where you actually meet other people supporting the association and learn about each other’s awesome projects and stories.

The working title is ‘Café du port’ — open to alternative name ideas though!

Members will be able to log in to an open zoom room or webinar, where some sessions will center on a member presenting something they’re working on — and given who’s part of this community: a research trip, a boat build of their own, creative work, an inspiring life story…the rest is just conversation, wherever it goes.

What’s ending: our WhatsApp community group

We’re closing the FSL WhatsApp community group at the end of the month.

It started as a nice, informal way to stay in touch for members, family and close friends, but it’s grown past what we can look after well, and it was never quite the right platform to serve as a proper home for our paying members.

Substack will remain our home base for newsletters, and we aim to share real-time updates and behind-the-scenes content behind a paywall for our members, and utilize the ‘subscriber chat’ feature more, just bear with me as I figure out best practices — we don’t want to spam you with too much content and want to find a better sharing balance.

If you’ve been reading along for a while and this is the nudge you needed — become a Crew Pass member is the easiest place to start.

And the FSL website is always a good place for trawl the archives. Most publicly accessible Substack posts go up on our blog, there is our evergreen content and project pages — loads of content you can check out at whatever time suits you best.

www.floatingstorieslab.org

Upcoming Events

Come join us at The Ocean Race Lorient, September 9-13, in the Racing For the Ocean tent at the Ocean Live Park. We will be presenting our Table of Curiosity art x science exhibition, alongside microscopes set up to observe debris from local boat cemeteries, and answering all your questions about our UN Ocean Decade Endorsed ReTISS citizen science project and the boat build.

Learn more

Angie is presenting at the ICES Annual Science Conference 2026 Network Session in Brest, Tuesday September 15^th at 17.00: Engaging citizens in marine biodiversity monitoring – Enhancing data flow into evidence-based marine decision-making

Learn More

Angie will next join our scientific partner Dr. Corina Ciocan to bring the Table of Curiosity to East Sussex (UK) for the Ocean Symposium and Marine Exhibition 2026, Saturday, 14 November 2026. This year’s symposium is inspired by the United Nations World Oceans Day 2026 theme: Reimagne: Beyong the World We Know, A New Relationship with Our Ocean.

Learn More

We also have a workshop percolating with the Global Estuary Monitoring Program (GEM) for the United Nations Ocean Decade Conference in Rio, Brazil, April 2027. Nothing concrete yet, keep your fingers crossed!

UN Ocean Decade Conference Brazil 2027

That’s all the news for now. Thank you for being here, we have some big months ahead and are beyond stoked to have your support on this journey.

Angie & Remy

Directors & Co-Founders,

The Floating Stories Lab Association

Brittany, France

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Recommended Video

We did it.

Almost.

Yesterday, after 10 straight days of working at the boat yard during the French summer holidays, we rallied a small crew of volunteers — Pascal P, Pascal M, Eva, Lorene, and Claude — to help Remy and I assemble the backbone and bulkheads of the port side hull. The girls and I also attended to other work — preparing the cabin for 10 new maritime pine planks to be epoxied, filling in the screw holes on the skeg with resin — as the boys prepped the bulkheads.

Earlier, during our preparatory phase, we (stupidly?) erased the lines Remy had marked out on the backbone and bulkheads, so as not to have them forever embedded in to the epoxy (we are not planning to paint the interior of the boat at this stage). This made it difficult for Remy to find his axis, so we had to set up the bulkheads on our (almost) level floor along the floor lines he’d drawn, plumed and squared them using a plumb bob, then fixed the bulkhead legs in place so they wouldn’t move when we laid the backbone in to the bulkhead slots.

Everything was going slowly but smoothly, until only two out of seven bulkheads snug flush in to their slots. For over an hour there was a lot of head scratching by Remy and Pascal trying to figure out what was wrong with the five bulkheads sitting roughly 3cm too high.

Was it the backbone? Were the scarf joins on the bulkheads the wrong size?

What on earth was wrong?

Remy checked his measurements, checked again. Everything seemed correct. There was either a small problem, or a bigger, global one. We would find a solution, of course, but it would help significantly to first find the error.

The evening crept in, the volunteers waited patiently. One by one they had to leave.

Remy, Pascal and I remained, but we also had to get home to the kids.

We are looking at the five bulkheads that don’t fit flush as though they are the problem, Pascal said. But what if we look at the two that fit fine?

Bam. There it was. Remy found a miscalculation in the lines drawings — those two bulkheads, the 3&4s, sitting either side of the midships, were drawn (and subsequently cut) 2.8cm too high.

We’ll explain how this happened in an upcoming video, but thankfully it’s a small, honest human mistake and an easy fix. We will need to remove those two bulkheads from the structure, correct their size, put them back in and fill in the notches and re-cut them so the stringers will line up perfectly.

We will correct the two that will be too large on the starboard hull before assembling, so it should fit snug from the get go.

Phew.

So we did it. We have assembled the backbone and bulkheads of the first hull and just need a little TLC to get it all fitting flush.

Remy goes back to work on Monday, so the baton will be passed to me to continue — quite urgently now — pre-coating the planking and gluing the stringer scarfs. Once this work is done, we will have the space available to assemble the starboard hull by early September.

The plan has always been to build both hulls at the same time, we have just experienced some challenges in finishing the pre-coating of the planking due to the extremely hot temperatures in Brittany this spring/summer. Thankfully, the weather seems to have cooled down enough for me to continue.

We can see a boat now. It’s a big one!

Thanks for being here.

We would absolutely love it if you would consider becoming a member of the Floating Stories Lab non-profit association from as little as 20€ per year. Alternatively, you can upgrade your Substack subscription to paid and become an annual member instantly.

Become a Member

Don’t forget to follow the build playlist on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@floatingstorieslab

A full length episode from this weekend’s assembly is in the edit pipeline.

Happy Sunday!

Cheers,

Angie and Remy

I will keep this short and sweet — we invite you to check out our latest, full episode on YouTube where we catch you up on two big months of work in the boat yard.

In other news, Remy and I took the kids away on a short camping vacation last week to take a step back from the build and enjoy family time in nature (and celebrate Remy’s birthday!) before coming back a few days ago with more motivation than ever.

As Remy still has another week off work for the summer break, we are back to our happy place together getting through the final preparations — building the midships faux bulkhead and gluing the 2 & 5 bulkheads to their L-shaped beam troughs — with a pressing goal of erecting the backbone and bulkheads before the summer is over.

Enjoy the new video and please consider upgrading your subscription or becoming a member of FSL to further support our work and help us keep all our content accessible to all.

You can also chip in by purchasing items on our Gift List: https://www.myregistry.com/organization/the-floating-stories-lab-plouhinec-finistere/5553635/giftlist

After over a year of planning, we hosted the Wharram Hui in Audierne, welcoming eight Polynesian-inspired catamarans (well, seven, and one Pacific Prao) to our local harbour for a weekend of festivities including the Wharram social sail.

A few days later, we helped Head of Wharram Designs Hanneke Boon sail her Pahi 63 ‘Spirit of Gaia’ from Audierne around the Point du Raz to Douarnanez for the Maritime Festival.

All of this alongside solid days in the boatyard with more volunteers than we’ve ever had at once and eager visitors coming to check on progress.

I finally had time to sit down in front of the camera last night to film an overdue weekly digest with all the highlights from the past few weeks, you can check it out on YouTube below — do give it a like and leave a comment if you resonate, it really helps our channel grow.

It felt truly joyful to be back on the water sailing. Remy and I learned to sail several years ago in the Bay of Biscay when we were based in southwest France when we first dreamed up the concept for the Floating Stories Lab. Unfortunately, recurring miscarriage then forced me off the water for several years, and since relocating to Brittany to begin building the boat we have not had much spare time nor access to get back out on boats.

Hanneke made sure that every skipper filled every available place on their boats for members of our community and the wider public who wanted to join the Wharram Hui social sail last Sunday. I hopped aboard ‘Sila’, a Tiki 30 stretched to 33, whilst Remy got a little more wet on board ‘Santa Sardinha’, our friend Benoit’s Hitia 17.

After some exciting upwind sailing in the morning we all rafted up for lunch, hopping aboard all the boats and enjoying the glorious weather and community. Here’s a video I put together to share my perspective of the social sail.

Remy and I were then back in the boatyard all weekend fixing a pretty nasty mistake we discovered a few days ago — I touch on this in the weekly digest and we’ll dive more into it in an upcoming full episode.

Today, I had Hunter and Flu in to help me work through the pile of Maritime Pine plywood panels that we’re coating on one side with epoxy and peel ply. It’s been quite a tedious job with the pine drinking far more resin than the okoume we used for the backbone, bulkheads, and beam troughs, which is honestly a good thing as we’ll only need to do one pre-coat on one side (as we’ll be glassing the exterior, and the inside will have a second varnish coat later). But the fluctuating temperature combined with the fast-drinking pine faces make for a challenge applying peel ply cleanly without dryness and bubbles. Nothing major, but definitely not as pleasant to work with as the okoume was, despite having to coat those faces twice.

I’ll leave you with the videos to enjoy and a small gallery below of images from the past two weeks. Thanks so much to Maarten Zanders for the drone shots you see in the gallery and the videos.

Finally, a small request: as a small, grassroots non-profit, we would love it if you became a member of our association from 20€ per year, or, upgraded your Substack subscription to paid. Thanks!

The summer festivities have finally arrived!

Remy, on hols for a week, went straight to the boat yard today despite the sweltering 35C+ heat. We won’t be bringing you a weekly digest tomorrow — it’s our little mermaid Sahara’s 3rd birthday and we plan to spend it with friends and family at the beach, where we’ve been escaping to each evening to cool off.

Below are some updates on what’s been going on, and what’s to come, this month.

Boat Build

If you missed our previous weekly digest, I welcomed three wonderful women volunteers to help me get started on epoxy coating our French maritime pine ply planking panels. The temp soared again the next day, putting epoxy work (and continuing through the 45-panel stack) on hold again.

Remy has since completed all of the bulkhead notches, cutting the bulkhead slots, and rounding the beam troughs as we’ll be doing curved decks. He’s now ready for me to return (after a week on the laptop writing up my Master’s Exegesis!) Monday to start the next phase of filleting and assembly work.

With four of us planned to work on the build all next week, and the weather forecast dipping to what looks like tolerable levels, we are thus itching to get on with it and get the backbones, bulkheads and beam troughs assembled this month. We received pre-made epoxy fillets from Resoltech last week, which I can’t wait to test out, along with a slower hardener that should extend the cure time in these warmer conditions when I re-start coating the planking next week.

Blavet River Bad Boat Mapping

I was joined last Tuesday by three volunteers — Tatiana, Tara and Angela — for a reconnaissance voyage up the Blavet River in Hennebont (Lorient) with the local harbormaster, Alexandre. There are abandoned boats scattered all along this precious waterway, though Alex has already done a wonderful job pulling near 200 out of the harbor with his office’s budget, which we documented back in April with visiting scientists (video filmed during that visit below).

Additional to the rotting boats on mooring balls, the Blavet is home to several wrecks of a decent age, skeletons rotting in the mudflats. A distinct Boat Cemetery, pinned on Google Maps and promoted as a touristic heritage site, features both large and small decaying boats and a variety of materials — timber, fiberglass, plastic, paint, steel, and who knows what else.

The surrounding ecosystem is shared with birds, fish, flora and organisms who depend on the river’s health, and we were both awed and saddened at both the abundance of wildlife and decaying boats.

As the site can be accessed on foot (it’s even part of a walking trail?!) I will be returning later in the month to collect data on the the boats individually and taking microscopic photographs of hull decay. This data will be added to our global, publicly accessible map of bad boats.

Bad Boats Map

Les rendez-vous de la mer | Wharram Hui

Our ReTISS citizen science initiative is now on tour with our art x science exhibition and ‘Table of Curiosity’ debuting at a local ocean festival ‘Les rendez-vous de la mer’ and Wharram Hui next weekend in Audierne, July 18 & 19.

Hanneke Boon will set sail from Falmouth (UK) this week for Audierne (Brittany, France) this week with her crew aboard Spirit of Gaia. She will then be docked along the quay next weekend, welcoming the public aboard for tours of her remarkable Pahi 63 Polynesian-inspired double canoe.

Several other Wharram Designs vessels will gather in the Audierne marina and a group sail is likely planned for Sunday.

Adjacent, FSL volunteers will join me at our booth to share our exhibition, and I am also teaming up with the local nautical center to co-lead biodiversity tours up the Goyen River, past our local Boat Cemetery, by kayak.

All events are free for the public.

Full schedule here: https://www.cap-sizun.bzh/actualites/les-rendez-vous-de-la-mer-des-18-et-19-juillet/

We hope you will consider becoming a member, and/or upgrading to a paid Substack subscription. Every cent is invested in to our boat build and citizen science work.

Subscribe now

Have a great week and we’ll see you in a couple with all the latest news and updates.

Thank you, and I mean it, THANK YOU, for being here.

Angie

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Hi folks,

Building a boat is no easy feat, but thanks to the support we are receiving from all over the world, we’ve been able to overcome some extreme obstacles (um, Remy breaking his neck last year?!) to keep pushing forward towards the dream of setting sail around the world.

The other night I discovered the first video we created sharing our plans for a Floating Stories Lab, published back in 2023. We’d been traveling nomadically mostly overland and on foot, re-settled in southwest France, and decided to learn to sail with a dream of refitting a secondhand boat as a vessel for slow ocean-based research and storytelling.

We always visioned the project would be greater than us, and to walk our talk we created the Floating Stories Lab Non-Profit Association last year after choosing to hand-build a 41ft wooden catamaran from scratch. We communicated our plans publicly, moved to Bretagne, and started cutting and planing timber.

It is incredible to watch our Substack subscriber base grow to over 550 people (thank you!), our Instagram is just shy of 10K followers, and our YouTube channel — recently monetized — is now at 2.4K subscribers and 350K views.

We created the Regenerative Tides: Sailing for Solutions (ReTISS) citizen science initiative a year ago, engaging communities in mapping end-of-life boats and analyzing their impacts on marine ecosystems, attracting a 20,000€ grant from the European Union Horizon Fund and United Nations Ocean Decade Endorsement.

We’ve facilitated two citizen science creative residencies, with our most recent participants collaborating on a ‘Table of Curiosity’ that we’ll now exhibit across Bretagne this summer (Wharram Hui in Audierne, The Ocean Race in Lorient, and an Ocean Science Conference in Brest) and the UN Ocean Symposium in the UK in the fall.

And back in May, we held our first ever Boat Build Residency, welcoming four absolute legends from across Europe and USA for a week-long boat building intensive, sharing meals and laughs after hours in our quaint coastal village of Plouhinec. It’s this residency experience that I want to talk about here today.

FSL is guided by an ongoing inquiry in how humans can live more regeneratively. Regeneration has increasingly emerged as a response to the limitations of sustainability discourse, shifting attention from minimising harm toward the active restoration and strengthening of social, ecological and cultural systems (Gorissen, 2020). Rather than viewing regeneration as a fixed methodology or design outcome, our inquiry approaches it as an evolving practice of participation within living systems.

The construction of the Floating Stories Lab 41ft Polynesian-inspired double canoe functions not as an attempt to present the boat as a model of sustainability, but instead as a site of inquiry through which regenerative thinking can be explored. The boat serves as both artefact and process; a material project through which relationships, decisions, tensions, failures, adaptations and forms of knowledge become visible.

To sound less academic, the FSL boat build is part of a macro vision to explore how all life can thrive on a flourishing planet.

When we started out just after the first Pandemic lock down in France, we were paying hundreds of euros out of our pockets learning to sail as a family with a private instructor and no access to a boat that we could regularly practice both sailing and conducting maintenance.

Sailing, it seemed, required wealth or a particular access not within our reach. I’m slightly embarrassed to say that we went as far as crafting A4 fliers with our number on it offering free labour to any skipper wanting a hand working on their boats on the hard, sticking them around all the ports in the southwest, and after a few weeks with no reply going back to rip off the perforated phone number tabs to make it look like there was some interest in our services — there wasn’t.

Building a new boat, then, didn’t even register as a possibility. A funny thing to reflect on today considering both mine and Remy’s grandfathers built boats. Being in France didn’t help — amateur builds are frowned upon. But once we discovered Wharram Designs’ self-build boats (through my work producing the Women & the Wind Documentary), we discovered there were designers — James and Hanneke — who genuinely wanted anyone to have access to build their own boat of any size and venture out to sea.

Wharram Designs

Still, building an minimalist Wharram requires access to more resources — financial — than ever before. The Boat Build Residencies partially grew out of a response to this; we wanted to create space for people interested in boat building to come try it out without breaking their banks.

We published an open call for applications, requiring a minimum 20€ annual membership commitment to the FSL Association to ensure serious interest, worked with advisor and former volunteer Federico Damiani on a short-list, conducted a round of interviews and then made our final selection of five (one unfortunately couldn’t make it at the last minute), charging an honest 350€ per person for the week (this covered purely the rented accommodation, food, and gas for return transfers to Quimper station where we picked up our visitors).

Remy took a week off from his corporate job and with no idea what to expect, we dove right in on Day One, where it became clear early on we had a special group of people. Everyone had a crack at all the jobs we had lined up for the week, and with this enthusiasm we were able to go beyond and add building the skegs to the list.

Filming this special week was a challenge with so many projects going on at once in the yard, but we ended up with a lovely video that I think reflects the special bond this team had, and — importantly — the space that was created for our group — Katarina, Giuditta, Bernardo and Nash — to get a taste of hand-building a 41ft catamaran from scratch. Whether everyone will go on to build a boat of their own is beside the point. For a brief moment in time, we came together with a shared mission, living and working collectively within a shared ecosystem, towards something greater than each individual.

The FSL boat build residency wasn’t what I expected. It was so much more.

Not only did we learn about Wharram construction and philosophy, learn to use power tools, work with epoxy and peel ply, we were held in the most wonderful and inspiring container for the whole week. The connections and the ideas shared added to the experience just as much as the actual physical boat building part.

But more than that, it reinforced my seafaring dreams, my purpose driven direction and put wind in my sails for future project and leading a life that will support all of that. I know where I’m going and Angie, Remy and my co-residents Giuditta, Nash and Bernardo helped me remember I have known all along.

Thank you Angie & Remy for such wonderful guidance, for your patience and for all that you have given—not just to us through this week of hosting and teaching but also to the project and your community in general.

I cannot wait to see where in the world (sea) we meet next!

Until then, fair winds

-Katarina

Imagine finding yourself with people you’ve never met before, sharing a week of work, exchange, and daily life. It’s not a given to meet and immediately feel like you are flowing the same waves, to collaborate, and to build a balance in such a short time.

For me, this is exactly what happened with my companions, and all of it was possible thanks to Angie and Remy, whose energy made us feel welcomed, cared for, and supported in our needs.

In the workshop I felt guided with patience and expertise in areas that were new to me, and listened to with respect, even in some difficult moments. This week planted seeds inside me that I can’t wait to see grow.

See you soon, Family.

-Giuditta

Wharram Hui Audierne, Bretagne, France.

July 18-19

We are now counting down the days (13) until the Wharram Hui and Les Rendez-vous de la mer events in our local port Audierne kick off July 18 & 19. This gathering of Wharram Catamarans is a very special chance to meet Hanneke Boon and enjoy a tour of her Pahi 63 Spirit of Gaia and view a variety of Wharrams of all different models and sizes alongside festivities celebrating the ocean.

The FSL booth will be perched along the Quay beside Gaia, showcasing our new Table of Curiosity recently developed with creative practitioners at our art x science residency. The table invites you to explore the impact of abandoned boats on marine ecosystems in a local context — the Goyen River Estuary and its polluting Boat Cemetery.

I will also be guiding a biodiversity kayak voyage with the local nautical center up the river on the Saturday afternoon from 1:30-3:30pm — free for the public, registration required.

You don’t need a boat to join in the festivities, just come along and find us in town.

You can't fight it, you can't breathe…

Whose listening lately, late nights in the middle of June?! I can’t think of a more appropriate soundtrack for the past weeks in Brittany, and unfortunately it seems we have our third heatwave approaching.

Braving putrid temperatures and a two-day black out were a group of talented artists and academics who joined us in Finistere for the 2026 FSL ReTISS Citizen Science Creative Residency. No joke guys, it was a bloody hot week. Between field trip visits to the local Boat Cemetery, kayaking up the Goyen River to view these sites of decay from the water looking back, and debris collecting, the team worked together during creative interpretation sessions to co-create the Table of Curiosity, which FSL will begin touring next month to festivals, events and conferences across Brittany. I am truly in awe at the artifacts created entangled in disciplines and mediums, and back-dropped by sleepless nights and mosquito invasions.

This was a residency to remember.

With the heatwave keeping us out of the boat yard for a week, we were able to dedicate all of our time to the residency participants and even sneak in evening hours at the beach with our visitors and the kids — a nice break, to be honest, from six solid months of intense physical labor in the boat yard, though always with the pressing to-do list from the boat build at the back of our minds.

We thus skipped a Sunday episode of our Weekly Digest video series, choosing instead to pack two weeks in one last night with an overview of work we’d got done on the build the week before, and what’s left in the prep phase before assembly.

Table of Curiosity

The ‘Table of Curiosity’ is a travelling exhibition booth built from the body of the Goyen River. Its base is recycled wooden pallets; its surface is four pieces of plywood, 3D-cut into the river’s shape and its estuary in Finistère, Brittany, then painted, sanded, and oiled by hand. This is the site where our citizen science initiative, Regenerative Tides: Sailing for Solutions (ReTISS), has mapped abandoned fibreglass (GRP) boats and their slow decay into coastal waters — the table reproduces that geography at a scale visitors can stand around and touch.

Set into the river’s surface, and cast into resin boat-hull moulds beside it, are fragments collected during fieldwork at the Boat Cemetery on the Goyen’s banks: paint flakes from end-of-life vessels, shards of GRP debris, corroded electrical and mechanical components, and discarded shells from the wild oyster and mussel reefs that inhabit this same stretch of water. Suspending this material evidence in resin lets us hold it still, caught mid-decay, rather than restoring or explaining it away. The table doesn’t depict the Boat Cemetery — it contains it.

Rising above the table is a mast, a nod to the wooden catamaran our association is building and to the sailing culture this coast has always lived by. From it hang collage posters made from recycled plastic, printed on a small hand press the residency artists operated together. Each poster also triggers an augmented-reality overlay when viewed through a tablet — 3D scans of the derelict boats, layered with footage of the surrounding ecosystem, so the static collage briefly opens onto the living site it was made from.

Alongside these lie cyanotype postcards in a different register: an imagined conversation between the rotting boats and the mussels living on their hulls, who are slowly ingesting them. We wrote these exchanges after days watching exactly that — bivalves feeding on the same fiberglass that fragments into their own tissue. Cyanotype, a process dependent on water and sunlight, felt like an honest medium for a dialogue between two things made and unmade by the same river.

Beside the table sits a scrapbook of fieldwork photographs — hands holding shellfish and buoys, students working the mudflats at low tide, microscope sessions in a school laboratory — alongside the Bad Boat Mapping field guide we use to train citizen scientists.

We built the ‘Table of Curiosity’ collectively — researchers, illustrators, designers, photographers, and citizen scientists working side by side during the residency — because no single discipline can hold what an abandoned boat asks: what happens to material that never fully biodegrades, and what does a community owe the water in return. It is the same question driving FSL’s wooden catamaran build, designed for collective use and with a death plan in mind — built to be repaired, repurposed, and eventually disposed of responsibly, rather than abandoned.

Artist Collective

Marta Musso - Marine Biologist and Illustrator

Angela Wicki - Designer and Art Educator

Letty Bidivanu - Journalist and Documentary Filmmaker

Maud Plantec - Visual and Material Artist, Researcher

Marjolaine Abaléa - Visual Artist

Nicholas Gant - Award winning social and sustainable designer and published academic | University of Brighton

Tanya Dean - Senior Lecturer, School of Art and Media | University of Brighton

Dr. Corina Ciocan - Marine Biologist and Eco-Toxicologist | University of Brighton

Angie Richard - Award winning producer, writer and creative practice researcher | Co-founder and President of the Floating Stories Lab

Learn More

Upcoming Events

Wharram Hui, Audierne, France: July 18-19

https://www.floatingstorieslab.org/wharram-hui-audierne-2026

The Ocean Race, featuring FSL’s ‘Table of Curiosity’ at the Ocean Literacy Hub, Park City, Lorient, France: September 10-13

https://www.theoceanrace.com/fr/atlantic/2026

ICES Annual Science Conference 2026, Brest, France, featuring a presentation of ReTISS by Angie and the ‘Table of Curiosity’ : 15–18 September 2026

Participating Session: https://www.ices.dk/events/asc/2026/Pages/Enganging_citizens_in_marine_biodiversity_monitoring.aspx

As always, thanks for being here. Learn more about becoming a member of FSL for future residency opportunities, or volunteering on our boat build and citizen science initiative.

Become a Member

Hi FSL community,

We are now in to Week 53 of our 12m Narai Mk IV Wharram Catamaran build and perhaps one of the toughest weeks for me personally, at least emotions-wise. The repetitive task of prepping and second-coating ALL our stringers really tested me. I have found that with new tasks or, perhaps, less repetitive tasks, I’m able to be full present in the task and all intruding thoughts disappear, as does the concept of time. This week, the seemingly relentless work on the stringers had me stuck in my head where visualizations of sitting on the deck of the finished boat in a remote anchorage sipping a sun-downer only made me deeply frustrated rather than motivated.

The Boat

Remy revived the mood on his Monday lunchtime visit, showing off his new mullet (cut by our 14yo teenager) — he removed the screws from our gluing work on the backbone stiffeners a day earlier and we walked both backbones outside to turn and flip so the ‘bow’ ends point towards the door, where someday in the next two to three years we will exit the hulls on a tractor and send them down to the water…

We set up the camera and took some still frames from the video shared in our Members’ WhatsApp community group. Seeing the backbones off the floor along with the scale has become a motivational booster — it’s a BIG boat and we’re getting there, step by step.

On Tuesday I really went for it, removing the peel ply, sanding out any imperfections and then wiping clean all of the 29 remaining stringers. The mental battle was REAL and I went home with both a swollen wrist and prefrontal cortex.

Wednesday is usually my day home with Sahara, but I scored a few hours in the afternoon with Ryder offering to babysit so managed to pop in to the yard to get more peel ply prepped to finish the stringers the next day. With some time left after rolling nylon, I jumped at the opportunity to develop my new favorite skill: administering boat injections.

Ironically, I hated science and chemistry in school. Now, I lead our UN Ocean Decade endorsed citizen science initiative ReTISS, and am the ‘alchemist’ of the boat build ;) I have developed a fascination for composites chemistry and learning the complexities of our materials, how they behave alone and how they interact with each other. We use screws to help with positioning and to enable the glue to have an excellent bond with the wood, but need to remove the screws so as to avoid complications down the road. As one of our members explained in our group WhatsApp discussion:

“…when the screw would start to rust (eg due to interaction with acids in wood, esp. in your movingui), the oxide will take up more space than the original material (ie it expands) and can create pretty impressive forces, easily pushing up the glass/epoxy layer and cause delamination.”

We’ll dive in to this topic in an upcoming episode video and Substack.

So I injected the removed screw holes along the ‘topsides’ (what I call the side currently facing up on the floor) of both backbones with mixed epoxy + silica, patched over with peel ply to push down on the filling and minimize sanding. I didn’t get through all of them and I would also later need to come back and top up a few holes once they’d cured where I’d not pushed the needle all the way down to the bottom of the chamber. Lesson learned (among many in this build!). We put a short reel of my process on Instagram, attracting 44,000 views (still rising!) and a bunch of new followers. I initially discovered the peel ply patch idea on YouTube short — I love this use case of social media, where open-source knowledge exchange can help in time saving and sparking ideas.

Thursday it was time to FINALLY check the second coat of epoxy on those remaining stringers off the list. Coating 29 in a day was a huge task and I was damn glad to see the last one going in to the cabin to cure. Remy went in to the yard to work for a couple of hours after his corporate job on Thursday night to begin work cutting the Movingui timber we will be using to make a midships frame.

Friday I finished my epoxy injections on the top side of both backbones, added the cured stringers to the ‘Xmas Tree’ racks where they will now rest for a while until we drum up the motivation to begin gluing the scarf joins to make them the ‘real’ length ready for assembling in to the bulkhead notches, which still need to be cut.

Remy took a trip to Lorient to meet a timber supplier, coming back with good news that we will be receiving a donation of ‘legacy’ stock including, likely, Iroko that will be great for making our deck planking!

Then we met at the yard, glued another beam trough, and set to work on the undesirable task of sanding the Movingui chicken pox off the inner keel, stem and stern pieces — no more hideous air bubbles caused from our epoxy + peel ply mistake we’d made several weeks earlier. Check out our latest full length Boat Build episode below to learn what went wrong.

This mistake and the amount of sanding we needed to do to rectify it was a reminder of how good peel ply is when you don’t mess it up — “without peel ply, I’d quit the build,” joked Remy. Sanding truly sucks.

By Saturday I was ready to pass the baton to Remy, taking a day off to be with Sahara and sending Hunter off to a football tournament. Remy is one of the most hardworking people I know (shhh, don’t tell him I told you) and it’s sometimes remarkable to think that he still has a hole in his vertebrae (the medical term is a ‘bridge’, I think, where the bone didn’t heal as well as hoped…). Don’t worry, he knows his limits, but he’s a tough ole bastard and I love seeing him happy in the boatyard, where he’d rather be than behind a computer in the corporate world!

He smashed on with sanding the topsides of both backbones and cutting the excess off at each end ready for us to assemble the stem and stern plywood. I popped in (of course!) late afternoon to top up the removed screw holes with my needle filled with epoxy and then we glued yet another beam trough. Remember, we have four more to make for the bulkheads 2+5.

Sunday, my spirits were lifted with Australia defeating Turkey 2-0 in their opening World Cup match and a pleasant morning at the beach with Remy and Sahara. We bumped in to Simone and his partner Mel and had a try of the awesome wooden belly boards Simone hand shapes — so much fun and the best way to get barrelled in crummy surf! Check out this fun video about Simone and his stoke for sliding on water by Jonas Hill below.

With both the boys out of the house for football, I stayed home to catch up on laundry and backing up all the footage from the week in the boatyard, along with sitting down to type up this newsletter.

Meanwhile, Remy braved the rising temperature in the yard to take on (one of) the next milestone(s) — cutting the slots in the bulkheads where they will slide on to the backbone.

And that, folks, is a wrap for the week.

Doing these Weekly Digest reports is almost like therapy (ha!) — going through to recap the week helps us to appreciate how much we are progressing. Even if it feels slow and small, the time we are putting in to preparation will save us in the long run, not just in terms of the build but also the longevity of the boat and its overall ability to provide decades of adventures for the FSL community. That sun-downer moment in a beautiful anchorage with many of you fine people is one week closer to reality!

As always, thanks for being here. We do it all again from tomorrow…hehe, stay tuned.

Angie & Remy

Keep track of the Job List or contribute with a purchase on the Wish List HERE.

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Upcoming Events

Wharram Hui Audierne July 18-19, Brittany, France.

There are currently 18 Wharrams registered for the upcoming French Hui, with many more folks from our respective communities joining in the festivities on land. If you’d like to be a part of this fun weekend, do book in to a local campground or gite sooner than later — it’s going to be a great weekend with a huge spectrum of Wharrams and their owners in the Port of Audierne.

Learn More

On show will also be Hanneke Boon’s Pahi 63 Spirit of Gaia — both just completed Gaia’s circumnavigation by returning to Cornwall ahead of the sail to Brittany next month.

Hi folks,

Last night we put out the first video in our new segment ‘Weekly Digest’ on YouTube, which we will be bringing to the channel every Sunday night. Do subscribe if you haven’t already!

As our long-form boat build episodes are about six weeks behind, we wanted to create shorter, weekly summary videos to share real-time updates and teasers as to what’s to come in the upcoming episodes. Members who have opted-in to our WhatsApp community get more regular real-time updates and are quite engaged in problem solving, advising, knowledge exchange and voting on the guest hull interior.

The past weeks have been intense to say the least. After a few months of welcoming regular volunteers and of course hosting our first ever Boat Build Residency last month, it’s mostly been myself alone in the yard lately, with Remy calling in on his lunch break and then working together on weekends. Whilst I enjoy working alone sometimes, it’s a strange feeling to go from the uplifting energy of community working together to the slower pace of solo work. I have no doubt we will experience this strange roller coaster throughout the entire build as people come and go. In some ways, our former nomadic travels prepared us for these frequent hellos and goodbyes!

With the rare May heatwave behind us, we are pushing hard to get as much epoxy work done as possible in the milder conditions, whilst finishing the necessary preliminary construction of beam troughs before finally assembling the backbone and bulkheads. Remy is calling end of July for this milestone assembly.

Enjoy the weekly digest video, do like, share, subscribe, and consider upgrading your Substack subscription to paid, or becoming a member directly through our website: https://www.floatingstorieslab.org/support

I’m off to go epoxy those 20 stringers I prepared yesterday!

Cheers,

Angie

Hi Folks,

Today marks one year since we received the keys to the boatyard at Cap Solidarité and leapt in building FSL’s 41ft Wharram catamaran with no prior experience.

A week later, Remy broke his neck in a bicycle accident.

Inevitably, the build time would be set back, but we never paused.

As Remy lay at home for months immobilized in a corset, scouring secondhand marketplaces online for hardwood, I rallied willpower and volunteers to kick off important preparatory work — building the floor, a table, cutting the Movingui hardwood we found for sale locally, drawing the lines at half scale with Pascal, planing timber…

Remy slowly recovered and by January, he had the all clear to go back to work — his engineering day job — part-time. He spent every other moment in the boatyard chipping away at jobs whilst I managed our scaling citizen science initiative, FSL communications, and our kids.

As winter passed behind us and our drying cabin built and working in full swing, the tables turned again. I was back in the boatyard full time taking charge of the epoxy work and catching up on lost time. Remy joins me most days at lunchtime and every weekend and national holiday. Recently, he took a week off to lead our first ever Boat Build Residency, and thanks to the help of our four fabulous participants — Bernardo, Katarina, Giuiditta and Nash — we have now made great progress.

We lost another few days of work during the rare European May heatwave last week — despite chipping away at some jobs in the mornings and evenings, when the epoxy began bubbling and melting in the tray in my hands, we knew it was time to just let go, PAUSE, and hang at the beach with the kids.

Boatyard rent (200€/month), a goal to flip both hulls in November ahead of the next winter (so the hulls can become humidity-controlled, heated work spaces to continue with all the interior work), and the overarching aim to hit the water by the EU summer of 2028 are all factors placing time pressure on our shoulders.

The minute we step in to the boat yard, however, time feels non-existent. Of course, doing epoxy work adds another kind of time pressure — you have to work diligently or that stuff will just cure in the tray! But once in the yard and engaged in a project, the stresses of time, money and life beyond the rickety warehouse doors seem a world away.

A year in, and I am proud of how far we have come. Our community has grown — both in person and online — and our adjacent citizen science project, ReTISS, has received UN Ocean Decade Endorsement.

We have learned a swag of new skills and, importantly, have begun developing our own intuition and experience around the boat build, becoming more confident to take decisions ourselves though always grateful for the tireless support of our advisors.

FSL has welcomed more than 20 volunteers from all over the world to the boat yard, with many more itching to come get their hands ‘dirty’.

We are co-hosting this year’s Wharram Hui in Audierne, debuting our FSL exhibition booth at an adjacent local maritime festival and then taking the booth to The Ocean Race’s Park City in Lorient September 9-13, showcasing our work in the Ocean Literarcy Hub.

We hosted our first ever art x science residency last year and are gearing up to co-host a second with the University of Brighton here in Brittany next month, and our first ever Boat Build Residency was such a hoot we will no doubt plan more.

Here’s what a couple of recent participants had to say:

The FSL boat build residency wasn’t what I expected. It was so much more.

Not only did we learn about Wharram construction and philosophy, learn to use power tools, work with epoxy and peel ply, we were held in the most wonderful and inspiring container for the whole week. The connections and the ideas shared added to the experience just as much as the actual physical boat building part.

But more than that, it reinforced my seafaring dreams, my purpose driven direction and put wind in my sails for future project and leading a life that will support all of that. I know where I’m going and Angie, Remy and my co-residents Giuditta, Nash and Bernardo helped me remember (what) I have known all along.

Thank you Angie & Remy for such wonderful guidance, for your patience and for all that you have given—not just to us through this week of hosting and teaching but also to the project and your community in general.

I cannot wait to see where in the world (sea) we meet next!

Until then, fair winds. - Katarina

Imagine finding yourself with people you’ve never met before, sharing a week of work, exchange, and daily life. It’s not a given to meet and immediately feel like you are flowing the same waves, to collaborate, and to build a balance in such a short time.

For me, this is exactly what happened with my companions, and all of it was possible thanks to Angie and Remy, whose energy made us feel welcomed, cared for, and supported in our needs.

In the workshop I felt guided with patience and expertise in areas that were new to me, and listened to with respect, even in some difficult moments. This week planted seeds inside me that I can’t wait to see grow.

See you soon, Family. - Giuditta

Two of our members/volunteers, Nash and Simone, recently had the time of their lives crossing The Bay of Biscay aboard Spirit of Gaia with Hanneke and crew from A Coruña in Spain to Falmouth. Until we can welcome you on board the FSL vessel, it is an absolute pleasure to connect our members with Hanneke and our wider community, facilitating opportunities for immersive ocean-centric experiences.

So yeah, what a year!

Reading our newsletters, watching the YouTube videos, commenting, liking, sharing, purchasing items on our WishList, becoming a member and/or donating…it all supports the Floating Stories Lab and what we are able to facilitate as a non-profit association.

Website

THANK YOU

Keep an eye out on YouTube next month for a special, long-form video reflecting on the first year in the boat yard.

In the meantime, Remy and I will be back in the boatyard this afternoon gluing the stiffeners on the second side of both backbones after turning and flipping them both this week. Then it’s time to fix in the 12 bulkheads, beam troughs, and standing the two hull skeletons upside down for the first time.

Yep, she’s beginning to look like a boat!

Happy Sunday,

Angie

President and co-founder, The Floating Stories Lab Association

Last month we co-hosted an important science and community workshop ‘'The environmental effect of decaying boats' here in Brittany, which brought together leading researchers working at the forefront of marine pollution and local voices from the community to discuss the issue of pollution from ‘Bad Boats’ on our coastal ecosystems.

We made this short video over the four days hosting scientists Dr. Corina Ciocan (University of Brighton, UK), Professor Frederic Coulon (Cranfield University, UK), Dr. Yasmin Meeda (Cranfield University, UK) and Dr. Melina Kourantidou (ISblue, France). During their stay, I took them to visit some of the Boat Cemetery sites where we have been mapping boats and collecting data as part of our UN Ocean Decade Endorsed citizen science initiative, Regenerative Tides: Sailing for Solutions (ReTISS).

ReTISS has also recently captured the attention of Reporterre, who today published excellent coverage of our work, which you can read here (in French, hit the translate button in your browser tab to read in English): https://reporterre.net/Resine-fibres-de-verre-Les-epaves-polluent-la-mer-et-les-animaux-marins

When I took reporter Chloe Richard down to the Goyen River a few weeks ago as part of her research for the article — a site I have been documenting for the past year and visited dozens of occasions now — I was shocked to make new discoveries:

• An end-of-life boat perched up a tree, rope leading down to the shore;

• Suspected asbestos debris in the mud;

• New (seemingly human-inflicted) damage on previously abandoned hulls further exposing fiberglass shards to the surrounding ecosystem.

It is indeed distressing to see further deterioration and increased pollution created from these open-air boat cemetery sites.

ReTISS Citizen Science

The good news is that communities really want to see change, and some local Harbour Masters like Alexandre Giry featured in our video are taking initiative to step up action to remove end-of-life boats from their ports. The cost of transportation to a dedicated boat dismantling center — an APER facility — is then up to boat owners, but here’s where the challenge lies. Many owners are deceased, non contactable (despite boat registration), or simply without the means to cover the high costs of towing their boat to a facility. At 100€ per 1-meter of boat to travel a mere 1-kilomter from the Hennebont Port to the closely APER facility, the costs become quickly out of reach (imagine the cost for boat owners whose boats are nowhere near a facility?!).

What about boat manufacturers? Where lies their producer responsibility?

These questions are continually raised in community dialogue about solutions…

What do you think?

Leave a comment

-Angie
President and co-founder of the Floating Stories Lab Association

I write to you with a full heart and big smile this morning, alongside a touch of sadness as today marks the FINAL day of our first ever Boat Build Residency. Tomorrow I to take our wonderful participants to the train station and bid them farewell…for now.

We did not know exactly what to expect when we kicked off last Monday, welcoming our new ‘family’ as Sahara now calls Giuditta, Katarina, Bernado and Nash, FSL members selected to join our inaugural, week long boat build residency.

We knew by the end of the first day we had a special group and this feeling was only reinforced all week. The job list was smashed out of the yard with smiles, boatyard karaoke, and plenty of dancing. Evenings were spent sharing meals and stories and sharing more about the greater vision for FSL once the boat launches and we begin the circumnavigation that members will have the opportunity to join.

Particularly rewarding is transmitting the new skills and knowledge Remy and I have been learning from Pascal and our other experienced volunteers so far to our boat build participants, all whom have no prior boat building experience (like us when we started the build).

This is accessible, tangible skill sharing and knowledge exchange happening in real time, and it’s incredibly fulfilling and possible thanks to the ethos of Wharram Designs — Dream. Build. Sail.

Just a day before the team arrived, Remy and I learned how to build the beam troughs, the subject of our latest video in the build series (see below). During the week, we taught the team how to build these and now three out of four beam troughs for bulkheads 1&6 (bow and stern of both hulls) are complete!

Over the past week, we have achieved a LOT, and the team is still itching to get in to the boatyard for one final afternoon today before they take off. We are so humbled!

Below are some photos from the week, with more shared on our Instagram, and a video will be out on the YT channel soon.

On Friday evening after a long day of working in the yard, we welcomed our local, eclectic crew of volunteers and members to join us in celebrating one year of the Floating Stories Lab Association. Thank you to everyone who came out in the wind, it was a fantastic evening and I particularly loved Pascal getting star struck when the one and only Roger Barnes arrived :)

Missing from the party were Simone and Nash, who made a last minute dash to A Coruña in Spain the day before after responding to a call I received from Hanneke in search of two new crew to help sail her 63ft Wharram Pahi Spirit of Gaia across Biscay to Falmouth. The guys made it safely and are now on board awaiting fair winds to begin the crossing.

Spirit of Gaia will be later sailing here in Audierne, Bretagne, with Hanneke for the Wharram Hui July 18-19, followed by the Douarnanez Maritime Festival. There is still time to register your Wharram boat, and if you don’t have a boat you are still welcome to attend the free Hui gathering.

Wharram Hui | Learn More

Citizen Science Creative Residency 2026

APPLICATIONS NOW OPEN!

We just opened applications for our second citizen science creative residency.

This residency brings together creative practice, citizen science, and interdisciplinary research to explore one of the most overlooked forms of marine pollution: abandoned fiberglass boats.

Developed in partnership with the University of Brighton, the 2026 edition expands into a collaborative research–creation space where artists, designers, and scientists collaborate to investigate, document, and reframe end-of-life boats as cultural, ecological, and material sites of inquiry .

Residents will contribute to the Regenerative Tides (ReTISS) citizen science initiative while developing creative responses that engage environmental data, lived experience, and new forms of public storytelling .

Learn More & Apply

If you’d like to further support the Floating Stories Lab Association, please consider becoming a Paid Member or upgrade your Substack subscription to get automatic annual Membership. We also accept one-time donations and are creating a Wish List of tools, consumables and other items to support the boat build. Get in touch if you’d like to offer more personalized support.

The past weeks have flown by here in Brittany. It has truly been nonstop with new volunteers, a week-long visit from Remy’s parents, and hosting four scientists from UK and French-based institutions for our UN Ocean Decade Endorsed Action ‘ReTISS’ — a citizen science initiative mapping end-of-life boats, examining their impact on coastal ecosystems, and searching for solutions.

At the end of June, we will host our second art x science residency here in Plouhinec, in partnership with the University of Brighton. Applications will open shortly — FSL members (including Paid Substack subscribers) get a first look at residencies and workshop opportunities, so do take a moment to choose one of our membership tiers or upgrade your Substack subscription to get priority access to opportunities.

FSL Membership Tiers

The boatyard has been buzzing with activity and new faces.

Ed visited for a week from the UK to do a university work placement just as Olivier returned to France from overseas travels to lend a hand, sharing tips learned from decades of experience working in boatyards. Pascal Petit paid a visit to kick off the next milestone step in the build: gluing the backbone and bulkhead scarf joins. We had a full house in the yard for the occasion! The video will be out next week on YouTube.

YouTube

Once glued, we suspended the backbone up on the wall overnight, which took a great team effort and was one of the more stressful moments for me in the yard to date. There are two major milestones I am NOT looking forward to: 1. turning the hulls (which we need to do before November ahead of the winter), and 2. dismantling the boat to move both hulls out of the yard and transporting them on tractors down to the port when we launch. I might call in sick on those days!

On Ed’s final evening in town I received a call from a skipper mate Aleksi who had just sailed in to Audierne on his newly purchased Tiki 30 (modified to a 33). Would we like to come down to check out his boat?!

The boat is exceptionally well built and we all had a wonderful moment poking our noses around inspecting every aspect of the build. The boat is registered for the Wharram Hui taking place on July 18-19 in Audierne — you don’t need to own a Wharram to attend and there are campgrounds within walking distance from the port if you’d like to join us for the weekend’s festivities, including visits to the FSL boatyard.

Scientific Visit

The next week, we welcomed four scientists to Plouhinec from their institutions in the UK and France, co-hosting a community x science workshop in Audierne on the impact of decaying boats on coastal ecosystems. I had a heavy bout of food poisoning the night before the workshop, barely making it out of bed on time to attend the event and present our citizen science results from our work with local middle school students in the Goyen Estuary over the past year. Our workshop made it in to the Ouest France news journal the next day.

Over the following four days, I took the scientists to visit three boat cemetery sites across Brittany to survey pollution in the sediment from abandoned boats and discuss the potential to collaborate on a greater research opportunity that could possibly lead to pollution mitigation solutions.

During our visits, we met one harbormaster actively making a difference. Alexandre of the Hennenbont Capitainerie along the Blavet River which makes it way out to the sea in Lorient, took on the task of removing abandoned boats from his marina from their budget. A crane was supplied by local boatyard Nath Yachting and dozens of boats were removed. They now lie across the road in an open-air public carpark, awaiting owners to claim responsibility and pay transportation to the nearby APER boat disposal center a mere one kilometer away.

Herein lies the fractures in France’s policy that slapped an eco tax on new recreational boat production to finance end-of-life disposal: owners are hard to trace despite boat registration (some are even deceased) and, if contactable, they often lack the funds to cover transportation. At 100€ per 1-meter of boat to travel just a kilometer away, it’s becoming clearer why boats located hundreds of kilometers from APER centers are not being picked up. Furthermore, typically owners also should front the costs of removing the boat from the water, and crane hire is commonly expensive.

In the meantime, derelict boats rot in our estuaries, coastlines, and public car parks, releasing micro particles of fiberglass, paint, plastics, and other toxic materials. Alexandre also commented more boats are being dumped at the car park by sneaky owners in the middle of the night who scratch off the registration to not be traced. This is something I see across designated boat cemeteries across the region — traditional wooden boat wrecks rotting in the shore become an attractive dumping ground for modern, ‘plastic fantastic’ derelict boats to be dumped along with other marine related trash.

*Dr. Corina and Uni of Brighton arts professor Nic Grant will be leading our upcoming art x science residency in June, do become a member or upgrade your Substack subscription today to be the first notified when applications open this month.

It’s back to the boatyard this afternoon for Remy and I. We’ve been profiting off a long weekend and teenage babysitters to smash out more work the past three days: all bulkheads are now glued, Remy is cleaning them up by hand-sanding and ensuring a smooth finish, and now that the beam troughs plywood pieces have been cut and epoxied, the cabin was emptied of plywood yesterday and filled with hardwood.

Enter another exciting milestone this afternoon: I will be epoxying the first layer of keel, stem and stern, and stiffeners! All just in time for our first ever Boat Build Residency participants arriving next weekend.

If you’d like to stay up to date in real-time, do consider becoming a member or upgrading your Substack subscription, enabling you to opt-in to our WhatsApp community group where we share behind-the-scenes from the boat yard, post opportunities and open calls, and engage more intimately with our growing community.

As always, thanks for being here!

Angie

Hi folks,

The past two weeks have been the most enjoyable in the boatyard for me thus far. Who would’ve thought I’d love the epoxy phase so much? Not me, that’s for sure. When Federico, our previous Italian volunteer who helped us for several weeks last year (check out his new Instagram account, documenting the building of a mobile wooden Sauna in Sardinia!) I confessed I was very nervous about reaching the epoxy phase. I think it was the fear of working under a time pressure, not to mention how important getting the right mix ratio is, saturating the plywood correctly, and the whole curing process. Fede reassured me that once you get the hang of it, epoxy work can be fun! Turns out he was right. I find the work flow almost meditative, and the epoxy we are using — Resoltech’s part bio system 1080 eco — is very user friendly. It’s good I like it because the primary work in the yard right now is epoxy!

But what about peel ply?

Confession: when Pascal Petit told us about peel ply last year and pushed us to buy our first roll, I had a lot of concerns. A fiddly, nylon material didn’t sound fun.

“What are the benefits”, I asked him.

“Oh! Many!”

Benefits of peel ply for a Wharram Boat Build like ours:

• Reduced sanding between coats

  • Leaves a clean, slightly textured surface

  • Saves a lot of time and dust (and sanding discs!)

• Improved secondary bonding

  • Creates an ideal surface for epoxy-to-epoxy bonding

  • Especially useful if you’re laminating in stages

• Removes amine blush

  • Peel ply lifts off any surface contamination as it’s removed

  • Reduces the need for washing

• Better surface quality

  • Leaves a uniform, matte finish (no glossy patches)

  • Easier to inspect for defects

• Controls excess resin

  • Absorbs surplus epoxy → lighter, stronger laminate

  • Prevents resin-rich (brittle) surfaces

• Holds fibers in place

  • Keeps fiberglass or veneer layers from shifting during cure

  • Useful on scarf joints or tricky shapes

• Cleaner edges and transitions

  • Helps feather edges without ridges or drips

  • Great for taping seams

• Protects the surface during cure

  • Acts as a barrier against dust, bugs, moisture

• Easy prep for painting or fairing

  • Once removed, surface is ready for filler or coating with minimal prep

In last week’s Boat Build Series video, Pascal gave us our first epoxy and peel ply tutorial, and the number one takeaway for me was preparation. So long as you are well prepared, epoxy + peel ply work is a breeze.

We have chosen to do two coats of epoxy on all the backbone and bulkhead pieces, and a third ‘varnish’ coat will be done later, just prior to launch. The work flow has thus been as follows:

• Coat first face with first coat of epoxy (3:1 Part A to Part B, e.g. 600grams of Part A resin with 180grams of Part B Hardener)

• Seal the coat with peel ply

• Leave to cure overnight in the drying chamber

• Repeat above process on the second face

• Remove first face’s peel ply layer

• Pass orbital sander without pressure with 120grit sanding discs (takes less than a few minutes)

• Add second coat of epoxy (the ply consumes much less epoxy on the second coat) and seal with fresh peel ply

• Leave to cure overnight and repeat the next day with second face

The second coat’s protective peel ply stays on now (removed at the last possible moment, prior to final ‘varnish’ coat of epoxy and boat launch) and these pieces can be removed from the cabin and stored in the work shop safely, ready for assembly.

With space for 10 drying racks in the chamber, we have been working around the clock to free up space for the movingui hardwood timber to start their drying cycle — prioritizing the stiffeners, stem and stern post (we get these in at the end of the latest video!) as they will take around two weeks to dry out to around 10 per cent humidity, ready for their first coats of epoxy. We need to get the first layer of keel in asap, too.

Why the time crunch?

Firstly, we are hosting our first ever Boat Build Residency from May 10-18, and are hoping to be able to begin assembling the backbone and bulkheads with our participants during this week.

Second, we have a goal to turn both hulls by November, to enable us to continue interior assembly and epoxy work over the winter. Shortly, our DIY drying chamber will have to be disassembled to allow space for both hulls to be constructed. Once the hulls are turned, we can cover them with the thick plastic sheets we’re using on the cabin and create an enclosed environment to heat and continue working through the cold. You can keep track of our progress on our public-facing ‘Job List’ spreadsheet, HERE.

So far, we’re on schedule for April, though we just ran out of peel ply and are waiting a new delivery next week. So with the pause on epoxy work for a few days, Remy is in the boatyard this weekend to scarf the bulkheads, and I am on standby to welcome Pascal again as early as next week to begin gluing and assembly of the backbone — bloody excited for that I can tell you!

Decaying Boats Science x Community Workshop, Audierne

In other news, we are co-hosting an important science and community workshop on April 27th in Audierne, Brittany (France), bringing together leading researchers working at the forefront of marine pollution and local voices from the community to connect knowledge, lived experience, and future solutions.

This is an open, participatory workshop designed to:

• Share emerging research on the environmental impact of decaying boats

• Explore how pollution spreads through water, sediment, and marine life

• Discuss impacts on coastal ecosystems and local livelihoods (including shellfish)

• Identify priorities and gaps in knowledge

• Co-imagine practical responses and long-term solutions

Learn More & Register

Upcoming Art x Science Residency

We are THRILLED to be hosting a second citizen science creative residency here in Brittany this year in partnership with the University of Brighton and will shortly open applications for local creatives based in Bretagne, France and Europe to apply. Stay tuned for more news and check out last year’s residency participants HERE.

Wharram Hui, Audierne, July 18-19

Join us for the Wharram Hui gathering of Polyensian catamarans this summer in Audierne! We’re especially excited to share that Hanneke Boon will be sailing her Pahi 63 Spirit of Gaia to Audierne for the Hui — a rare and inspiring chance to see her boat and connect in person. Over 12 Wharram Catamarans have registered for the Hui thus far. You don’t need a boat to attend, but will need to book local accommodation as soon as possible (there are great campgrounds in the area!).

Learn More & Register Your Boat

That’s a wrap for this week, have a great weekend!

-Angie

I write to you with a big smile at our family dining table as a chicken roast cooks for our routine Sunday roast. We will be in the boat yard later like all Sunday afternoons, so our weekly big lunch with the kids at home is a pleasure and our way of remaining somewhat grounded during these busy times.

And busy it’s been.

The Floating Stories Lab is celebrating its one-year anniversary as an association this month—though we’ve not quite reached a full year in the boatyard.

When I trace the path here, it feels almost improbable. From our nomadic family backpacking adventures across Asia and beyond, to my growing discomfort with the extractive methodologies of the documentary projects I later participated in… to an ‘ah ha!’ moment sitting on the edge of a jetty in Raja Ampat after a film shoot, questioning what a different way forward could look like—just as a sailboat came into view, quietly planting the seed for a floating storytelling and research platform.

And now, to be sitting here today, one year into turning a far away dream in to reality, reflecting on the community that has taken shape around FSL—both here in Brittany and through digital spaces like Substack (and our buzzing WhatsApp community for members)—the recent progress on the boat build, our UN Ocean Decade endorsement for ReTISS citizen science…it all feels truly remarkable.

We will have a video coming out in June highlighting a year in the boat yard, but I do want to take the time today to truly thank many of you for being here since before the association even started. We shifted the project to a community-centric structure to “ensure that this project serves far more than our family,” and so many of you jumped on board to support in a myriad of ways before we had even built the flooring at the boat yard.

The growing community is humbling—and still only a glimpse of what is to come when we launch FSL’s 12m Wharram catamaran and begin to circumnavigate.

And even though we dream of sailing every day, it’s the present journey that keeps us anchored. The salty breezes moving through the boatyard push us forward toward splash day—still more than two years away—and carry us through the harder moments, like when Remy broke his neck at the very start of the build.

Sharing all of this together is what truly drives us. It’s what brings joy into the now.

Hand-building both the boat and FSL as a living, breathing community ecosystem makes it feel—tangibly—that better futures are possible.

This past two weeks have been particularly buzzing in the boatyard. We finally drew all of the bulkheads at full scale and cut them out, with the help of Pascal Millot, one of our new and more regular volunteers. This paved the way for a HUGE milestone moment: the beginning of epoxy work!

Our local advisor, Pascal Petit, gave Remy, Simone and I our first epoxy and peel ply tutorial on Monday, and since then we have powered forward as we work around a deadline of having all of the bulkheads and backbone pieces epoxied and removed from the drying cabin by April 10th at the very latest. This is to ensure we can begin the drying cycle for the Movingui hardwood, which will take approximately three weeks to dry, just in time for the Boat Build Residency participants to arrive in May.

Though we had excellent results stress testing the Australian 100% BPA free bio epoxy, Change Climate, we currently cannot receive more due to supply chain issues. We thus chose to use a French composite brand Resoltech’s part-bio epoxy 1020 ECO, and their 1026s hardener, appropriate for the still-cool conditions here in Brittany.

This has turned out to be a great choice, with the epoxy so far being a dream to work with, odorless (we still mask up as anyone should do working with any resins, including bio), and having fantastic results with peel ply. I honestly feared the epoxy stage for months, having never done anything like this before, and now I love it. Pascal is pleased and can’t wait to teach me how to make fillets :)

The benefits of peel ply are that it minimizes sanding and reduces consumption of sanding discs, inhibits air for better curing, and is probably the best way to protect the resin and keep the surface clean right up to the ‘last minute’, ie before varnishing or painting.

We have chosen to do two coats of epoxy on the backbone and bulkheads now. Yesterday we removed the protective peel ply from the first coat of cured resin, gently ran an orbital sander with a 120-grit disc over the surface before cleaning and applying the second coat of resin and peel ply.

For the scarf joins (a topic of chatter in YT comments and in our member’s group recently) we did not apply a second coat; the joins will be glued as we begin to assemble the backbone in the coming weeks. We’ll dive into all of this in an upcoming video :)

We highly recommend The Gougeon Brothers On Boat Construction book to learn more about best practices for scarf joins with epoxy, and we are also grateful to the technical team at Resoltech who are advising us on best practice with their products (not sponsored guys, they are just great to work with!).

With the help of Simone and Ben, we got the second coat of one face of almost all 10 racks of plywood pieces yesterday, and today* Remy and I will prepare the second face ready for epoxying tomorrow.

*A shout out is required here to our teen boys who have not only helped across various stages of the build so far, but have stepped up most recently to babysit on Sunday afternoons and public holidays so Remy and I can work together.

Don’t forget that the JOB LIST is a publicly accessible spreadsheet; you can keep track of our progress or look at what jobs you might want to volunteer on.

View Job List

Well, the Sunday roast chook is ready, so that’s my cue to wrap this newsletter up!

I just want to finish with sharing that TWO of our members recently purchased secondhand sailboats, Simone and Lisa. Through FSL they have connected with each other and Simone will actually be joining Lisa on a North Atlantic crossing in June to bring her new boat to the UK. Congratulations guys!

Become a Member

Remy and I visited Simone on board his new boat this week and, just as we boarded, Marc (who helped us with the drawing the full scale curve and cutting/scarfing the backbone recently) putted by on his boat, rafting up and hopping aboard. What a great moment!

We can’t wait for more moments like this at the Wharram Hui we are co-hosting on July 18-19 in Audierne. More details HERE.

Simone is hand-building beautiful wooden belly boards for small wave sliding; check out his Instagram and get your orders in for summer.

Happy Easter, have a great weekend!

—Angie

President and Co-Founder, the Floating Stories Lab Association

I had a blast editing the latest episode in our Boat Build Series. What a week it’s been! Not only have we had spectacular Spring temperatures but we have again made significant progress in the boat yard.

In this latest episode, we address our wet wood issue by building plywood drying racks, a wood drying chamber, and we tackle the task of scarfing ALL our movingui timber stringers and the starboard hull’s plywood backbone joins.

Next week we will be preparing for a special visit by Pascal Petit to begin epoxying the plywood! It’s then all hands on deck throughout April to ready all the backbone and bulkheads for assembly, ideally during our Boat Build Residency taking place in May.

Don’t forget to check out the Job List spreadsheet HERE; keep track of our progress or look up a job you might be interested in participating in—we accept volunteers all year around.

Speaking of volunteers, we could not be where we are without all of the help you’ve all put in so far. Most recently, Simone and Pascal Millot have been visiting the yard weekly and are always a text away from help when we need it. From the bottom of our hearts, THANK YOU.

As Remy mentions in this week’s video, we are working seven days a week with the goal of getting this boat in the water by the European summer of 2028. Once we splash, we’ll set off on a circumnavigation for regenerative futures research, storytelling, and citizen science projects. Members will have priority to join legs of the voyage, so do consider joining our tribe. We have a behind-the-scenes WhatsApp group sharing real-time updates and opportunities.

Our members are also connecting with each other with is amazing to witness — two will shortly be crossing the Atlantic Ocean…stay tuned as I’m sure we’ll have news to share about their upcoming adventure!

Become A Member

It is an absolute joy hand building this project together. We appreciate all of the support, from following our Substack posts to contributing financially (via upgrading your Substack subscription or becoming a member), donating tools (contact us!), time, energy, or simply good wishes.

Have a great weekend everyone and do leave a comment if you enjoyed the video!

Cheers,

Angie & Remy

March has been welcomed with a huge buzz of activity at FSL, with the boat build springing forward. As we showcase in the latest Boat Build Series video, Marc joined us at the beginning of the month for his professional wooden boat building school’s week of work placement, drawing the lines of our Narai Mk IV catamaran’s backbones and cutting out the ply pieces.

With the help of our regular, locally-based volunteers Pascal M and Simone, our wood drying cabin came to life whilst I took on the task of scarfing all our movingui hardwood stringers on both ends ready to dry in the chamber as soon as the dehumidifier arrives this week. The guys built the plywood drying racks and so as soon as the drying chamber is in action in a few days, the plywood will be ready to epoxy when Pascal P visits the last week of March, with the timber expected to take a few more weeks.

This weekend, Remy picked up where Marc left off scarfing the starboard hull’s backbone joins. You can track real-time progress in our WhatsApp community by becoming a member of FSL: https://www.floatingstorieslab.org/support

The next video will share all of these updates and more!

You can now track our monthly progress on our job list spreadsheet HERE.

Job List

Regenerative Tides Endorsed by the United Nations Ocean Decade

We are STOKED to share an important milestone for our work at Floating Stories Lab (indeed, Remy and I shared a celebratory bottle of champagne when we received the news ourselves!):

Our citizen science initiative Regenerative Tides: Sailing for Solutions (ReTISS) has been officially endorsed as a Decade Action of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030).

The endorsement was granted by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO following an international review process, with this important recognition placing our project within a global network of scientists, communities, and institutions working toward the Ocean Decade vision:

“The science we need for the ocean we want.”

What the Ocean Decade Is

The UN Decade of Ocean Science is a worldwide initiative bringing together researchers, governments, NGOs, and citizens to accelerate ocean knowledge and solutions for sustainable development.

By endorsing projects around the world, the Ocean Decade aims to strengthen collaboration between science, society, and policy so that ocean science can better support environmental protection and climate resilience.

We are honored that Regenerative Tides has been recognised as contributing to this global effort.

About the Regenerative Tides Project

Regenerative Tides addresses an overlooked but growing environmental problem: abandoned fiberglass boats and their release of micro-fiberglass particles into coastal ecosystems.

Through a citizen science approach, the project brings together:

• coastal community members

• artists and storytellers

• students and educators

• boatbuilders and sailors

• marine scientists

Participants collaborate to:

• map abandoned boats along the coastline

• collect environmental observations and samples

• document local knowledge and lived experiences

• share findings through open data and storytelling

By combining community observation, scientific guidance, and creative communication, the project aims to generate knowledge that can inform future solutions and marine policy discussions.

View the Bad Boats Map

Part of the Global Estuaries Monitoring Programme

As part of the endorsement, Regenerative Tides will contribute to the Global Estuaries Monitoring (GEM) Programme, an international initiative focused on improving understanding of estuarine ecosystems.

This connection will allow our citizen science work in Brittany to contribute to broader conversations about coastal monitoring and environmental stewardship.

Learn More about ReTISS

FSL Citizen Science now has it’s own YouTube channel and Instagram handle — do go over and follow/subscribe/share!

Pre-order ‘The Northern Voyage’ by Maya Rovegno of Sailing Magic Carpet

I had the absolute privilege of reading an advanced copy of Maya Rovegno’s spectacular sailing adventure book, ‘The Northern Voyage, to review for the print version, which is now available for pre-order.

Maya and her husband Aladino produce weekly videos for their successful sailing series Sailing Magic Carpet, as they adventure around the world. I also recently had the pleasure of welcoming Maya for a rare interview on the Fire Pit Talks Podcast, and am delighted to recommend her outstanding book with you all.

Pre-Order Now

Finally, as I wrap this Substack newsletter on a chilly Sunday morning (where did Spring go?!), I want to share that we have selected the FIVE participants for our first ever Boat Build Residency that will take place here in Bretagne in May. We were humbled by all the applications and feel positive we will host more of these residencies over the course of the boat build.

If you aren’t able to commit to attending a residency, but have an interest in Wharram catamarans or our work at Floating Stories Lab, you might consider visiting in July, for the Wharram Hui in Audierne, a local ocean festival, and the famous Douranenez maritime festival. Boat registrations are still open (we have over 10 Wharrams joining the event so far!), and those without boats wanting to attend are encouraged to book in to the local campgrounds or other accommodation as soon as possible.

Learn more here: https://www.floatingstorieslab.org/wharram-hui-audierne-2026

That’s all from me this week, thank you — no really, THANK YOU — for being here and supporting all things FSL.

— Angie

President and Co-Founder, the Floating Stories Lab Association

We have been chomping at the bit to share the latest video in our Boat Build Series with you all and here it is!

Marc, a student from the traditional wooden boat building school Atelier l’Enfer, joined us for part of his work placement last week, helping us to leap ahead at a very important stage of the build: drawing, cutting and scarfing the…

Read more

As is often the case at these events, we barely managed more than a few passing exchanges between sessions and dinners. But what little I learned about Lisa intrigued me immediately. After our first proper video call, I knew I wanted to sit down for a long form yarn on Fire Pit Talks so you could meet this thoughtful, grounded, quietly powerful woman too.

Hailing from the Great Lakes, Lisa grew up five minutes from Lake Michigan in a family where water wasn’t just a real estate perk, it was a teacher.

Her father is an engineer, woodworker and metallurgist. Their home life revolved around sheds full of tools, hardwoods stacked and labelled, half-built hulls, metal fittings on workbenches, ideas in motion. She grew up watching boats take shape from raw materials, learning the grain of mahogany, the weight of oak, the patience required in making.

Water, she says, was always treated as sacred. Not in a ceremonial sense, but in the deeply practical, Midwestern way of knowing that if you live beside 30% of the world’s freshwater, you protect it. You pay attention to runoff. You notice pollution. You understand that what enters a tributary eventually reaches somewhere bigger.

Those early years shaped her more than any degree ever could.

And yet, there were degrees. Lisa trained as an anthropologist, a discipline that studies how humans organise themselves, how cultures form, how systems endure and collapse. It’s a field with colonial roots, which she’s acutely aware of, and that awareness has shaped how she moves through the world now: with curiosity, humility, and an insistence on partnership rather than extraction.

Her professional life has been wide-ranging. Two decades spanning nonprofit work, corporate strategy, food systems, regenerative agriculture, experience design. If you look at her CV alone, you might think it zigzags. If you listen to her speak, you realise there’s been a steady through-line: living systems.

Food systems. Craft heritage. Waterways. Community design.

The same questions keep appearing in different forms:
- How do we live well without extraction?
- How do we repair without romanticising?
- How do we build systems that nourish rather than consume?

When she moved to Suffolk last year, it wasn’t random. It was magnetic. Sutton Hoo, the 7th-century Anglo-Saxon burial site where a 25-metre clinker-built ship was discovered, became a new chapter in her lifelong relationship with boats. She became involved with the Sutton Hoo Ships Company, working on the reconstructive archaeology project rebuilding that longship using traditional methods.

If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like to cleave fresh English oak by hand, to shape planks with edge tools that have barely changed in centuries, to rebuild not just a vessel but a memory, Lisa can tell you.

And this is where it becomes particularly compelling for our community.

Because Lisa doesn’t romanticise the past. She’s not interested in nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. What fascinates her — and what aligns so deeply with Floating Stories Lab — is how traditional knowledge can inform future design. How remembering forward (as Australian academic and author Tyson Yunkaporta phrases it) can inform regenerative innovation.

In our conversation, she moves fluidly between the longship buried in a Suffolk hillside and the ghost boats we map in Breton and Briton estuaries. Between clinker-built oak hulls and deteriorating GRP. Between the joy of building something with your hands and the systemic challenges of marine waste.

What struck me most is her steadiness (and her infectious smile!).

Lisa speaks about “pause” not as withdrawal, but as a regenerative practice. As resistance to a system that consumes humans as readily as fossil fuels. She is currently taking what she calls a sabbatical season in Cowes (writing, reflecting, sailing, recalibrating) asking herself where she can add the most value next. It is a deliberate choice, one that many of us rarely give ourselves permission to make.

There’s courage in that.

There’s also warmth. Lisa lights up when talking about intergenerational knowledge transfer — grandparents volunteering in boat sheds, children setting tables in edible schoolyard kitchens, families building small clinker dinghies together over a weekend. She believes in connection as strategy. In joy as infrastructure. In feeding people as policy.

You’ll hear it in the episode.

You’ll also hear how her Great Lakes upbringing, composting before it was fashionable, gardening out of necessity rather than trend, understanding water as life, still shapes every decision she makes.

When I look at the photographs she’s shared with us, I see continuity. Not reinvention. Not branding. But an authentic life lived in relationship with water.

That’s why I wanted you all to meet her.

Because as we grapple with end-of-life boats, marine micro particulate pollution, access to the sea, and how to rebuild custodianship in fractured times, we need people who can hold complexity without collapsing into despair. We need anthropologists who understand systems. Sailors who understand materials. Mothers who understand food. Designers who understand experience.

And we need conversations that weave all of that together.

Our Fire Pit Talks episode with Lisa Rose does exactly that.

Pour a cup of tea (or a glass of something sparkling), settle in, and listen.

Episode Notes

In this episode of Fire Pit Talks, Angie Richard sits down with anthropologist, experience designer and storyteller Lisa M. Rose, MPA for a conversation that travels from the Great Lakes to Sutton Hoo’s Anglo-Saxon longship reconstruction to the Isle of Wight and today’s global crisis of abandoned “ghost boats” and marine pollution. Lisa shares her work with the Sutton Hoo Ships Company in Suffolk, where a 7th-century clinker-built ship is being reconstructed using traditional methods. Together, we explore what reconstructive archaeology, craft heritage, and traditional ecological knowledge can teach us about modern boatbuilding, materials, and responsibility. The conversation weaves through:

• End-of-life fiberglass boats and polluted waterways

• Citizen science as connection, not just data collection

• Joy, humility, and “beginner’s mind” in complex systems work

• Why pause is part of regenerative practice

• Access, privilege, and who gets to love the sea

  Share The Floating Stories Lab

After a long wait, we are thrilled to be co-hosting this year’s Wharram Hui (gathering) in Brittany, France, July 18-19.

When Hanneke (Head of Wharram Designs) floated the idea of a Hui in France last year, we had just come off the Women & the Wind Documentary tour in Brittany, begun our boat build, and then Remy unfortunately broke his neck, so we were not able to facilitate such an event.

This summer, the timing could not be better to welcome the Hui to France, with Hanneke planning to sail her Pahi 63 Spirit of Gaia from Portugal to Brittany (via a birthday stop in Cornwall) in the spring and summer to attend both the Hui and Fêtes Maritimes de Douarnenez festival.

Why Audierne?

This year’s Hui will be a bit different from previous gatherings, being held in the Port of Audierne in Finistère. This is of course our local port —Floating Stories Lab is based in the adjacent village of Plouhinec, and our boat (a Wharram Narai Mk IV, being built in the next village, Plozovet) will launch here in the Port of Audierne in a few years time.

Remy and I fell in love with Audierne two years ago when scouting places to move our family and build the boat. Hanneke joined us in Lorient before hopping aboard French artist Benji Flao’s re-launched Tiki 28 Louloute, sailing with him to Audierne and then on to the Douarnenez for the maritime festival.

This year, with the support of the local Communauté de communes Cap Sizun-Pointe du Raz, the Port authorities have agreed to welcome the Hui with an offer of 50% off marina berth fees for Wharram skippers for this special event, which will now also coincide with a local ocean festival.

The Wharram connection with Audierne goes back even further, however, well before FSL’s existence, with Spirit of Gaia making her entrance in the Port of Audierne back in 1992, tying up alongside the traditional wooden langoustier CAP SIZUN. (As a cherry on the cake, CAP SIZUN is celebrating her 35th birthday this year.)

We are thrilled to be welcoming the Hui to Audierne this summer and especially cannot wait to see Gaia and all your beautiful Wharram catamarans arriving to the harbour. Skippers are encouraged to register their boats as soon as possible via this form (full Hui event details listed below).

Don’t have a Wharram boat (yet)?! You are more than welcome to come down and participate in the weekend’s festivities—mark your attendance via the Facebook Event Listing HERE. Don’t miss out on this rare chance to view the Wharram mother ship Spirit of Gaia and have a tour on board!

FSL will also have a booth at the local ocean festival running adjacent to the Hui, and I will be guiding bio-cultural kayak journeys in the afternoons with the guys from Centre Nautique Plouhinec. Visits to FSL’s Wharram Narai Mk IV boat build site will be made possible for those interested in checking it out.

See you in July!

Angie & Remy

Wharram Hui Audierne 2026

📍 Port of Audierne, Brittany, France

📅 July 18–19, 2026 (early arrivals welcome July 17)

🤝 Co-hosted by Wharram Designs & The Floating Stories Lab

We’re delighted to confirm that the Port of Audierne will be welcoming Wharram boats for the 2026 Wharram Hui, taking place over the weekend of Saturday 18 & Sunday 19 July.

The Hui has been officially approved by the port as a nautical event (manifestation nautique) and will coincide with a local community ocean festival, making this a lively and memorable gathering both on and off the water.

We’re especially excited to share that Hanneke Boon will be sailing her Pahi 63 Spirit of Gaia to Audierne for the Hui — a rare and inspiring chance to see her boat and connect in person.

If you’d like to join the Hui, please register via this form as soon as possible: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScO5DshiykM3qpz-qm0K117Qykvieoub5KDRbFUy5rKpA8Z0w/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=113958329633618293409

⚓ Berthing – Special Hui Rate

All Wharram boats registered for the Hui benefit from a 50% discount on overnight marina berthing fees (regular rate table: https://www.portsdecornouaille.fr/.../2025/01/AD-2025-.pdf).

Example nightly rates (high season, after Hui discount, approx):

Tiki 26 → €16.50

Tiki 30 → €19.50

Tiki 38 → €25.50

Final berth allocation (pontoon berths) is managed by the Port of Audierne, based on boat size and availability.

Included Services

•⁠ ⁠Overnight stay

•⁠ ⁠Tourist tax

•⁠ ⁠Access to port facilities

Charged separately if used

•⁠ ⁠Electricity on pontoon

•⁠ ⁠Fresh water

•⁠ ⁠Careening / haul-out

📝 How to Participate

Please register via this form as soon as possible: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScO5DshiykM3qpz-qm0K117Qykvieoub5KDRbFUy5rKpA8Z0w/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=113958329633618293409

Registrations will be submitted to the Port of Audierne to determine your mooring fees. Payments will then be handled directly by the port.

📩 Questions?

Contact Angie Richard: angie@floatingstorieslab.org

⛵ Continuing on?

After the Hui, Spirit of Gaia will sail on to Fêtes Maritimes de Douarnenez (July 23–26). Learn more: https://fetesmaritimes.fr/

We can’t wait to gather again — boats, people, stories, and sea.