A cannon on a sparrow

02 October 2026

Seven students, on three campuses, none of whom had met, and not one of them a sailor, spent four weeks this winter building the case for something they had never seen and, in at least a few cases, may have needed to look up: a youth sailing programme with enough boats to take a full patrol to sea for more than an afternoon.

The programme, which has not even been a stand-alone programme so far, is ours. Aurora. And in fact, we don’t really intend to run our own independent programme; what we intend to do is doing more, with Port Melbourne Yacht Club and the Sea Scouts. Next to the yacht club’s small fleet of tiny X3s (unfortunately discontinued) and a rag-tag fleet of Sea Scouts vessels, we have been taking young people out on the water on our own, privately owned (off-the-beach) yacht (anywhere else called a dinghy): Aurora (the first), an RS Quest bought new and paid for by us. One boat carries three or four young people. What limits how far the programme can go is not interest; it is hulls - of the right type. Three Quests could carry a full patrol, and a full patrol is what could turn a fun afternoon on the bay into a multi-day adventurous expedition. So the question that started all of this was a small one with a large tail: what would it take to get from one boat to three?

It began with a phone call and a good question. A contact at the Scout State Sailing Centre in Sandringham asked what we would do with another boat. We thought about it, and decided we would rather have two more boats. Two more boats make a flotilla — and a flotilla requires a good many pieces of eight, which do not, as a rule, wash up in Port Melbourne at the scale required. So a plan was needed. Or better, seven students, from three corners of the world.

How we could potentially raise money for two more boats became a Monash TeaMWork project — the university’s programme that puts students from different campuses and disciplines onto a real brief for a few weeks. Monash was cool enough to agree to yet another rather unusual project from me: the fundraising campaign to take Aurora from one boat to three. Seven students took it on: Monash Melbourne, Monash Malaysia, Sciences Po Paris; backgrounds across accounting, finance, computer science, politics, FinTech, digital business and analytics. Four weeks, across three time zones, all of it on a screen - never touching the water (we will get to that later).

Maybe not what the students expected. Certainly not what the students expected. A global, multidisciplinary team — trained in the disciplines you point at large companies, accounting and finance and FinTech and analytics — aimed at two dinghies on Port Phillip Bay. A cannon on a sparrow.

They did not have to enjoy that. A student on track for corporate finance and a graduate job at a multinational could reasonably have opened this brief, seen a tiny youth sailing programme with a two-boat problem and a community-sized budget, and quietly wondered what they had done to deserve this. Not one of them did. They leaned in instead, fully.

I have thought about why, because it was not obligation — you cannot fake four weeks of effort across three continents. Part of it, I think, is the sparrow itself. The purpose is legible to anyone in a sentence: get more young people out on the water, on more boats, for longer. No jargon, no abstraction, something you can see. And underneath that plain surface is a problem that turns out to be properly hard — small in dollars, small on a map, and much larger than it looks the moment you try to solve it. A legible purpose and a real challenge is a combination that earns effort a giant impersonal brief never will. So look at what they did with it.

They costed it properly. I had handed them a rough figure. What came back was costed to the dollar — every line traced to a real quote, down to a corrected price on a compass. They built in room to move. Rather than hand back a single number and hope, they went through the kit and marked what was essential and what could flex if the full figure proved hard to raise — a way to reach the goal in stages instead of all at once. Thinking about a client’s options that carefully, unasked, is not the instinct of someone treating this as a university assignment.

They created funding tiers and named them well. The equipment came back grouped into packages — “The Wayfinder” package for navigation, “Voices on the Water” for the radios, “The Safe Passage” for safety gear, “The Fleet Lens” for cameras, “The Crew Essentials”, “The Fleet Canvas”, and “The Core Boat” for everything structural. Somebody on that team enjoyed themselves, and it shows.

They read the back catalogue of tales. To understand what they were raising money for, they went through the Aurora story from the start and found the line that says it best — a young participant at a Governor-General’s Camp who spent most of a day capsized, cold and shivering, and pronounced it the best day of his life. That sentence is, as far as I can tell, the entire case for youth sailing in one breath: soaked, freezing, and delighted, all at once. The students put it at the centre of the campaign.

What they handed back was not a slide deck of good intentions. It was a costed, structured, internally reconciled campaign — every figure in the report tracing to a financial model, and the model tracing to real quotes. I met the team each week, and it was the part of the week I looked forward to.

None of it is committed yet — no money raised, the structure still open, the timeline already moved. What four weeks produced is not a fleet. It is a careful plan for one, and the confidence that we have a solid plan, ready to go.

Someone reading may see where they might fit into the Aurora story. So, without asking for anything: the realistic ways a person helps a programme like this are a whole boat, of which two are wanted; or a category of gear rather than a hull — navigation, safety, radios, cameras, crew kit; or trade and supply, if you work in marine hardware, sailmaking, storage, transport or printing; or expertise, in not-for-profit structure or marine insurance; or an introduction. Or just relevant professional experience you would like to share with the next generation of seafaring youth. Or nothing at all, and just having read this. We are not set up to take anything yet, and that is mainly because we have not had a chance to actually drive its realisation - it’s a volunteer activity, the same as Scouts and our yacht club. When the time comes, we have a plan that’s been professionally created. That should not stop you from reaching out, however.

But the real story here is the seven people who took a two-boat problem as seriously as if it were a corporate fleet, and turned four weeks and a screen into something real.

Aurora is a youth sailing and outdoor-education initiative at Port Melbourne Yacht Club. This is a note about a student project, not a fundraising appeal.