Boat expressions of interest to open in April 2024

Do you have a wooden boat? Interested in showing it off at the Australian Wooden Boat Festival 2025? Read on below!

The Australian Wooden Boat Festival, held in Tasmania, is the largest celebration of wooden boats in the Southern Hemisphere. The iconic waterfront festival is held over four days on the Hobart Regatta long-weekend in February every two years. With tens of thousands of visitors to the site, the festival celebrates over 450 beautiful wooden vessels both on land and on the water.

The theme for the AWBF 2025 is New Zealand and Pacific region, including Japan, west coast of US, right across the islands and to Australia.

In 2022, expressions of interest (EOIs) were opened for boats afloat in April. Between April and October, 400 boat afloat EOIs came through, with nearly 50% of those coming in the first six weeks of opening. 43% of boat afloat EOIs came from outside of Tasmania, remarkably.

147 boat ashore EOIs were received, with EOIs opening for boats ashore in April and closing in November. With a large contingent hailing from interstate.

We have listened to boat owner feedback when creating the EOI form for the 2025 AWBF, and you should now be able to save your progress and return to the form without losing all of the entered information (hooray!). We do say this time and time again though, your information is really what matters. It not only helps with the scoring process, it is used for the website boat directory, your boat board and promotions.

We have also introduced a new photo upload which will be chosen by you, as your favourite picture of your boat, that best represents it, to be used on the website boat directory. This is aside from the five provided to the scoring panel. This is to reduce the workload on our volunteers, who previously have had to manually select the most appropriate image image from the five, (for each boat) to be used on the website.

Boats Afloat

As usual, we expect a large influx of EOIs for displaying a boat afloat. For some years now we have implemented a scoring process, as we have more boats express interest than we have berths available. For 2023, we had 400 boats enter, and about 320 berths available (dependent on size etc). See the 2023 web directory for afloat here.

This scoring panel consists of a number of expert boatbuilders, enthusiasts and historians. The information you provide in your boat registration is what is scored. Think; historical importance, age of vessel, designer and builder, representation of type, vessel story, condition and quirks. Your registration form matters, as this is all the scoring panel see. Your contact information is not passed on, and the scoring panel do not get given the boat owner name, to avoid any bias. Once this process is completed, we will start to notify you via email if we can offer you a berth OR a place on a waitlist. No boats get rejected.

Out of the 400 EOIs, about 320 boats were offered a berth straight up, and the remainder on a waitlist. We had about 60 withdrawals in the lead up to the festival for a variety of reasons, leaving only about 10 boats on the waitlist the week of the festival. If a berth became available we would find the next boat of the same size to reallocate the berth too.

As you can imagine, we don’t want anyone to miss out, and we do our absolute best to include as many boats as safely possible (clearly, given the on-water space we are allocated from TasPorts usually only houses a certain number of boats, and we expand that by 10-fold). We make berths where they are not usually possible. We work with individual boat owners to do this as safely as possible, and we try and share the ‘best’ berths around (so the same boats don’t always receive the same berth).

The theme for 2025 is New Zealand and Pacific, so we expect a high interest from outside of Australia and hope to work this theme into the boat ashore and afloat display. It is exciting to think of the different styles of boats that this may entice. We have asked if your boat has had experience in the NZ/Pacific region, in your EOI. If it has, great! We may get in touch to explore that story for promotion of the theme.

Boats Ashore

For 2023, we were lucky to gain the City Hall as a display space for boats ashore. We wheeled trailers in, made cradles and set up sails, to showcase the dinghies and smaller boats as best we can. An indoor area allowed for us to really expand our reach. We saw so many boats attend, with many spread out across the festival site too. For 2025, we are using this space again to display as many boats ashore as we can!

For boats ashore EOIs, again, the information provided in the form really helps us place these boats, although they are automatically accepted. We really look forward to seeing the variety of craftsmanship registered in this category. See the 2023 web directory for boats ashore here.

In 2023 a fabulous weekend was had by all involved, and post event we received some heart warming comments..

“One of the best festivals ever, and a real privilege to attend and display my boat.”

“I think all the thanks should go to you and your team. It was extremely well done by all, form the initial organisation to the implementation on the day.”

“Best festival to date! Organisation was first class”.

Why display a boat?

Whether it’s ashore or afloat (or even a model! Registrations will open for Model Boats later in the year), this is your opportunity to showcase your pride and joy to tens of thousands of people. Catch up with old friends, meet new people, share your experiences and knowledge.

Stay tuned and sign up to our enews via our website to be notified of opening dates!