Sharing Pics; A million hits

It has been amazing to see the on-going use of the pics I have uploaded to Flickr. When I began building boats it was quite a recent thing- to share images- and I was fortunate enough to spend many hours gleaning ideas, inspiration and techniques from generous people all over the world.

So during my builds it seemed like a sensible thing to annotate some pictures and share them. The albums have remained mostly unchanged since then, but this week it gave me an unreasonable amount of pleasure to see the total views of these albums go beyond one million hits.

The two most popular albums are of two very different boats, The Waller 540, a speedy, modern sloop, and the Navigator, a traditional looking planing hull with wooden spars. It is quite interesting that often if there has been a lot of interest in one boat on a given day, the following day someone else will be looking at the other boat.

Over the years now I have had some great contact from a selection of these builders, and have had some further input into their project. Occasionally they send pictures of their efforts and I have really enjoyed that, and the thought that by collaborating within a network of interested people, sharing skills freely and with no financial reward we are fostering creativity and personal growth internationally.

In this time of internet everything, one million hits is nothing to get excited about, but for me, given how particular this interest is, and how unusual it is in the modern world for people to build small wooden boats, it remains evidence that in a greedy, sometimes corrupt and sometimes angry dangerous world there is some goodness, freely shared.