A great day at the Putt Putt regatta – just the tonic to cheer me up

Not just a community carnival, but one for wooden boat enthusiasts – just what this blogger needed to lift his spirits. For the past week, I've pushed the unfolding economic news to the back of my mind as I focused on getting my pretty little boat ready for the show.

But for that distraction, I might have become depressed, not just at the risk of the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression, but at the boring predictability of most of our bloggers and newspaper columnists. Yes, from both the left and the right.

And as for our politicians! Even allowing for the frustration at being in Opposition in times of national or global crisis, Malcolm Turnbull – the guy I still hope will remake the Liberal Party into something liberals could vote for – disappointed me with an unexpected shallowness, displaying more style than substance.

For a few days, I beavered away in the shed chiselling out and painting a nameplate for the transom, “Peter Pan”, and in smaller letters, “Woy Woy”. Once I would have paid a signwriter, but Merry has drawn shut the purse strings. Ah yes, it's millions of similar decisions which accelerate an economic hiccup into recession or even full-blown depression.

Still, it cheered me when a bystander at the the Lions Park launching ramp asked: “That's you, is it?” Right. Got it in one. Now I'm seventy, I can refuse to grow up.

At the ramp, we hoisted the sails – a standing lug mains'l and a little triangular mizzen out over the stern, both a rich brown tan – but with no breeze, we needed the little outboard to head across to the channel north around Rileys Island. With son Ben at the tiller, grandson Tim as crew and me as the proud old codger up front, we motored to the Davistown waterfront.

The annual Putt Putt regatta focuses on a marvellous part of Australia's heritage, the motor launches – most of them of traditional clinker construction – constructed in their hundreds by skilled boatbuilders all around the Australian coast, and powered by simple, robust motors.

Davistown is a fine site for this celebration. Tucked away on a creek running out of the Central Coast's Brisbane Water, it was the location of 19th and early 20th Century timber-getting and shipbuilding enterprises. Its name honours the Davis family, strongly involved in those early industries. Rock Davis operated a major wooden ship building yard across the water at Blackwall.

Peter Pan isn't a putt putt, so it's outside the main focus of the carnival. But it is a traditionally shaped wooden sailing dinghy (to a design by Hobart naval architect Murray Isles), albeit with a modern clinker ply and epoxy construction, so it did qualify as an entrant.

I had a great time yarning with other wooden boat enthusiasts, swapping and comparing information about designs and materials and suppliers. Joined the putt putt procession motoring up Paddys Channel, around Pelican Island and the oyster leases, and back through the Woy Woy channel and that narrow passage that divides St Huberts and Rileys Islands.

Mid-afternoon, when people were pulling their motor launches on to trailers, the wind had freshened. For the first time, we didn't need the outboard as we sailed back to the Woy Woy Lions Park ramp. A most enjoyable end to the day.

Let's leave it there. I may have some worthwhile ideas to put on this blog when I resolve some of those ideas I pushed to the back of my mind, but why spoil the mood today?

Portrait of the old journo as a young lad

Seventy. The big Seven-O. Your blogger has made it to 70!

The celebration could not have been more enjoyable – family and friends came together in a beautiful setting for most of last weekend.

I particularly appreciated this birthday card,from young friends who said it reminded them of the caricature I sometimes use to depict Old Grumpy

Our offspring, partners, and their offspring, along with some valued friends, set up a small tent village right on the Wangi Wangi Point. Others rented cabins in the adjoining Lakeside Tourist Park. For us – Merry and I – they provided a modern on-suite cabin on the hillside looking through the trees across Lake Macquarie.

We took along two lovely small boats I've built, and they were a splendid sight as we sailed them out of the little bay and into the brisk breezes on Lake Macquarie.

We sipped beer and wine and soft drink, barbecued meat, nibbled salads, talked and laughed, and sat in camp chairs watching grandchildren bond with their cousins as they learned to mess around in small boats.

On Saturday night, we revived our traditional family recipe – Black Chicken – dating back to the days when everyone perched a grill or steel plate on bricks in a corner of the backyard and called it a barbie. Today, of course, it's de rigueur to have those huge trolley things with gas burners and dials and woks and rotisseries and hoods sitting on our patios – but they won't cook Black Chicken.

To make it authentic, our mob unearthed a family heirloom, a rectangle of woven steel mesh cut from some quarry screen we scrounged back in the mid-60s. You put it over an open fire, and lay out large chicken drumsticks and marylands (marinade them first if you want to be a bit fancy), turning them often as dripping fat makes the flames spit and flare while the skin darkens to near-charcoal. Messy, but delicious.

Sunday morning, I wake early, feeling great. Friends have given me a new book, Not The Costello Memoirs. Thank God it's not the real thing, and it's brief. Who wants to plough through the story of The Man Who Never Made It?

(Indeed, my friends appear delighted when I tell them the real memoirs are one of the publishing flops of the year. I point to this report in The Weekend Australian, headed “Costello outsold by a cookbook” and beginning, “Peter Costello's memoirs have been beaten at the bookstores by a children's fantasy novel and a book of home recipes that use four ingredients or less.”)

A most enjoyable book – the spoof, that is. Here's “Peter” talking about the early 1970s: "The immoral and discomfiting socialist agenda began – quite understandably – to destabilise me, as did an undiagnosed lack of calcium in my spinal column.”

But this is unworthy of me. How could I rejoice at Costello's travails on such a happy birthday weekend?

I put the book aside and walk down the hill to the campfire, where everyone is tucking into bacon and eggs and croissants. Overnight, the wind has changed and it's blowing strongly, so we decide against more sailing. Provided they stay well inside the sheltered bay, the grandkids may keep practising their newly learned rowing skills.

And so another happy day drifts by, talking with friends and watching children play, before we head home. Perhaps we can do it again soon – the annual Putt Putt Regatta at Davistown on October 26 might be next. Let's try for it.

Above: The sheltered bay at Wangi Point. Our family and friends camped on the headland in background, and we stayed in a cabin just out of frame to the right. [The scenic image is from the holiday park brochure, while we''ll try to pay for our use of the birthday card image by suggesting you'll enjoy others on the publisher's website, which offers a free facility to send e-cards.]