The Floating Stories Lab

05/09/2026

Inner stem and stern posts are on, and the first layer of inner keel planks are ready for their scarfs to be glued to lay on the backbone. Port hull is coming along!

03/09/2026

Sailing A Designer’s 63ft Hand-Built Catamaran. Full video on YouTube

02/09/2026

New Video Alert!
Recently, we joined James Wharram Designs designer/builder Hanneke Boon aboard her hand-built 63ft double canoe Spirit of G*ia, for a day sail from Audierne to Douarnanez.

There truly is nothing more motivating to continue our 41ft wooden catamaran build than sailing on our designers' and enjoying everything these boats have to offer.

Enjoy the video and be sure to subscribe to our YT channel — we are documenting our full build.

Hanneke Boon is a designer, boat builder, and sailor. Spirit of G*i...

31/08/2026

Hi, I'm Angie Richard, President and Co-Founder of the Floating Stories Lab Association.

I'm an Australian writer turned documentary filmmaker turned boat builder and researcher. And I'm a mum of three.

My husband, Remy (French), and I co-founded FSL here in Brittany, where we are hand-building a 41ft Polynesian-inspired catamaran that — once splashed — will circumnavigate, hosting ocean-centric research, storytelling and citizen science projects along the way.

We will live on one hull, and YOU — our members, researchers, scientists, artists and enthused ocean-lovers — will be invited to join legs of the journey in the guest hull.

We are currently documenting the entire build on YouTube, and we invite you to follow along: https://www.youtube.com/

You can also check out our citizen science initiative, Regenerative Tides: Sailing for Solutions, a UN-Ocean Decade Endorsed project engaging coastal communities mapping end-of-life boats and analyzing their impacts on aquatic ecosystems.

We host residencies, volunteer days, and workshops. Get in touch if you are interested in lending a hand on the boat build or mapping bad boats.

Cheers!

Angie

31/08/2026

Do you know what happens to boats when they're too old to be used? Unfortunately, many end up in landfill or are left to decay in estuaries, marinas and even on land.

Our Floating Stories Lab citizen scientists have been mapping abandoned boats across Brittany (France), the Isle of Wight (UK), and a site in Portugal, over the past year, as part of our UN Ocean Decade endorsed initiative, Regenerative Tides: Sailing for Solutions (ReTISS).

College students involved in our research discovered fiberglass and microplastics — thread and paint-like flakes — in the gills of all oyster and mussels collected and sampled from a local boat cemetery in the Goyen River Estuary, Finisterè.

The scale of the problem is huge.

At Floating Stories Lab, we invite community members to get involved through data collection, creative practice, and policy advocacy.

Learn More: https://www.floatingstorieslab.org/regenerative-tides

31/08/2026

Back in the boatyard Sunday together getting the legs back on our two troublesome bulkheads. They’ve now been slotted back in to the backbone and we’re ready to start gluing stringer scarfs, the keel, and really get this port hull taking shape.

We’ve decided to halt on erecting the starboard frames until we’ve finished pre-coating all our maritime pine plywood planking (45 panels) so we have a bit more work site space to move around. One face is already coated, so we’re nearly there.

Don’t forget to go subscribe on YouTube, our latest milestone video is gaining a lot of momentum, so we think it’s worth giving it a watch 🙂

You can also join our Substack newsletter.

28/08/2026

Lately in the boatyard

27/08/2026

It took a few sets of hands to erect the port hull of our 41ft catamaran but we did it! Full video on YT.

26/08/2026

We pre-coat everything with epoxy and peel ply for our 41ft wooden catamaran. Resoltech

25/08/2026

1 Year Hand Building a 41ft catamaran. Watch our new video on YouTube 🪚⛵️