theCASTLE: Week 4

Week 4:

Early in the morning on Thursday, week 4, we walked over to Youth Futures to meet Lisa and to organise a bus out to our site visit to Ken Gourleys yacht. As often happens with this kind of thing, I had no idea who Ken Gourley was, and why we were going to see him particularly, but we hurtled out to Beauty Point in the Youth Futures bus, chatting to Lisa about our respective times in Mumbai among other things. When we arrived the weather wasn’t brilliant, but we headed out onto the jetty passing a range of medium sized yachts that were bouncing around at the end of their mooring ropes. Ken Gourley it turns out is a 50-something sailor who designed and built his own boat purposely for sailing around the world in 180 days solo.

The boat, or yacht, that Ken had built was 70ft(?), and quite wide (apparently). Unfortunately the conversation deviated a lot from what the majority of us were actually interested in, such as the storage options and psychology of living in a small space, and on top of that, sitting in the bench seats along the side of the boat were below the window line and I started feeling really sick after a while from all the bouncing around from the storm warning, but Ken did have interesting stories. The boats interior was made to be like a lot of individual rooms. This meant that when the weather was particularly rough on his trip there were boundaries to how far you could fall or be thrown within the space. The half walls of each room created a lot of handrail opportunities for the inside.

The kitchen and bathroom/laundry spaces were particularly interesting for us, unfortunately the black waste water from the toilet just end up going into the sea rather than there being an amazing storage solution, but it was (and had to be) so minimal in the space it took up. The kitchen was really ingenious with a rocking stove to counteract the swell and bouncing around of the boat, and a sink, fridge and storage all within an arms stretch for the person cooking. The bedrooms and places to sleep were apparently storage for Ken’s round the world trip, but otherwise can be used to house a lot of people for a weekend trip. It seemed to be the central section of the boat was really well planned out, but the two ends with the sleeping spaces were oddly shaped and less usable than the rest.

At the end of our visit after we had crawled around and investigated all that we could about the spaces, Ken started signing autographs for us, which was a little weird, but we all smiled politely and headed off –feeling a lot better for being out into the fresh air again. The afternoon after we got back from the boat we spent organising our first presentations for next week. Our group was on the slightly more wishy washy conceptual topic of Habitation and we didn’t end up organising what we were actually going to say for our talk right until the eleventh hour.