The 2025 boat festival calendar kicks off with the Australian Wooden Boat Festival in Hobart, Tasmania from 7-10 February. Held biennially since 1994, the AWBF is the largest celebration of wooden boats and maritime culture in the Southern Hemisphere. The 2023 festival welcomed over 450 wooden boats, plus hundreds of exhibitors, speakers and performers and 60,000 visitors over the four days. Despite its size, it’s a free event, run by volunteers. This year’s festival features several Pacific heritage vessels, including Te Karangatahi, Australia’s first traditionally carved Māori Waka Taua, launched in Fremantle in 1996.
With two bank holidays, long days and – we hope – more settled weather, May and June pack in many of the UK’s most popular events. In the south west, the first May bank holiday sees the Isles of Scilly host hundreds of crews for the World Pilot Gig Championships, while Brixham Heritage Regatta is traditionally held over the weekend of the late spring bank holiday at the end of the month. Falmouth Classics and International Sea Shanty Festival will take place from 13-15 June and gathering a fleet of heritage boats to the historic harbour at Portsoy, the Scottish Traditional Boat Festival returns from 27 – 29 June.
In Ireland, Cork Harbour Festival returns from 24 May-2 June, including the long-distance, multi-craft rowing race Ocean to City – An Rás Mór on 31 May. After last year’s bumper Brest and Douarnenez year, the big one on the French festival calendar in 2025 is the Semaine du Golfe du Morbihan, held from 26 May – 1 June.
This unique event takes place every other year, gathering more than a thousand boats from all over Europe and the world on the Gulf of Morbihan in Brittany. Sailing in different flotillas between islands and stopping in a new harbour each night, the festival is an extraordinary sight. Kathy Mansfield brings us a selection of photos from the last Semaine du Golfe in our January/February issue, as she looks forward to the 2025 festival.
No boat festival calendar would be complete without the annual Thames Traditional Boat Festival, back this year from 18-20 July. Held in Henley-on-Thames, ‘The Trad’ mixes hundreds of fine wooden boats, from elegant slipper launches to historic Dunkirk Little Ships, with a collection of vintage, classic, military and amphibious vessels and vehicles. Looe Lugger Regatta returns from 25-27 July 2025, when wooden fishing luggers gather in their Cornish home port for this biennial weekend of racing and revelry; a unique chance to see some of Britain’s last remaining working boats skilfully handled in and out of Looe’s strongly tidal harbour – many without an engine.
Across the Channel, the Festival du Chant de Marin in Paimpol from 8-10 August brings together traditional boats and shanties from all over the world to celebrate the best of maritime heritage, attracting more than 100,000 festival-goers. September brings North America’s largest wooden boat festival, with the Wooden Boat Festival held in Port Townsend form 5-7 September.
If you have an event you think should be included here, we’d like to hear all about it. Get in touch at cat@watercraft-magazine.com