![\"Image](\"https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/127/2026-11-09-The-Plot-Ten-Years-Early-to-the-Longevity-Party-FINAL-V1-1.jpeg\")
Part 4 of 18 · A history of the giant freshwater prawn
In 1991, Taiwan had between 500 and 600 venues where you could pay to fish for giant freshwater prawns. And have your catch cooked on the spot.[1]
The industry behind them was built less by export markets or restaurants than by a pastime. In 1971, the Tungkang Marine Laboratory in Pingtung County, in Taiwan’s south, succeeded in raising the larvae of what the Taiwanese call the Thai prawn, and a farming industry followed.[1][2] By the early 1980s, Pingtung’s prawn farmers, looking for more customers, opened their ponds to the public. In 1983 a local magazine noticed people there suddenly “enthusiastically fishing giant freshwater prawns”.[2]
It moved to the cities. Prawn fishing caught on at farms on the outskirts of Taipei, then at small stalls in the night markets, and then in large indoor halls, where people fished, washed, grilled and ate their catch without leaving the building.[2] Through the late 1980s, venues sprang up along the Gaoping River in Pingtung as farmland turned into prawn ponds.[2] By 1989 Taiwan had more than 200 prawn hatcheries; the larger prawns, over 25 grams, went live to local markets.[3]
The pastime drove the numbers. Taiwan’s farms produced 1,315 tonnes of giant freshwater prawns in 1984 and 16,196 tonnes in 1991, the year the fishing venues peaked.[1][4] The customers did the harvesting, and paid for the privilege. Output fell back after 1991, as disease spread through the ponds,[4] but the pastime stayed. Taiwan still has the world’s highest concentration of prawn-fishing venues, some open 24 hours, some offering stir-fry, barbecue and karaoke alongside the rods.[1]
If you are ever in Taiwan, look for the characters 釣蝦場 (diàoxiāchǎng, a prawn-fishing ground). Taipei has a cluster in Shilin, just past the National Palace Museum. An hour buys you a rod, a plastic chair and a bucket of bait, and you eat only what you catch.[6]
The regulars know what they are after. Some especially prize large males of 75 grams or more, for the jolt they put on the line, and at least one Taipei venue keeps a separate pool just for males.[1][7]
Which leaves the farms that stock the pools with a question: where do the jumbos come from? Raised together, from the same hatch, only a few males grow into giants, and most of the rest never do.[5] In the 1980s, scientists set out to learn why in Hawaii and… Israel.[8][9]
Sources
Part 4 of 18 · A history of the giant freshwater prawn · Previous: Part 3, Science in Hawaii, an industry in Thailand · Next: Part 5, Even the pond has office politics · SHRMP.bio’s strategy behind it: shrmp.bio/strategy.html
", "image": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/114/2026-11-06-SHRMP-Feature-GFP-Part-4-1200x630.png", "author": { "name": "Gregor Lichtfuss" }, "tags": [ "The Shrimp", "SHRMP.bio" ], "date_published": "2026-11-10T10:10:00+11:00", "date_modified": "2026-11-10T10:10:00+11:00" }, { "id": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/ten-years-early-to-the-longevity-party.html", "url": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/ten-years-early-to-the-longevity-party.html", "title": "Ten years early to the longevity party", "summary": "Future Assembly, Melbourne, December 2016 · Ageing Well Australia, Sydney, February 2027 A complimentary invitation arrived today: “Australia has hacked lifespan. Now for the hard part.” It is for Ageing Well Australia, Economist Impact’s first conference on what it calls the country’s longevity transition. Five hundred people, the Fullerton Hotel in Sydney, 25 February 2027.[1] The pitch is that our…", "content_html": "Future Assembly, Melbourne, December 2016 · Ageing Well Australia, Sydney, February 2027
A complimentary invitation arrived today: “Australia has hacked lifespan. Now for the hard part.” It is for Ageing Well Australia, Economist Impact’s first conference on what it calls the country’s longevity transition. Five hundred people, the Fullerton Hotel in Sydney, 25 February 2027.[1] The pitch is that our health, finance and housing systems were built for shorter lives, and that the extra years now have to be healthy, productive and paid for. One session is called “Financing longevity: who pays?”
In my 2016 words: “let’s also strap in for higher taxes, higher Medicare levy.” In December 2016, at the Future Assembly in Melbourne, I gave a talk on ageing. “I am German – I have to start with Goethe.” Of course. “Blut ist ein ganz besonderer Saft.” Blood is a very special kind of juice. Mephistopheles, in Faust, 1808.
“Humankind has always been striving for a longer life.” Medea drained the blood of old Aeson and refilled his veins with the juices of plants (I think the idea lived on into the 2020s in the form of curcumin injections…). Sherlock Holmes, in 1923, followed a professor who climbed walls at night, after injecting himself with a serum made from langur monkeys: made up, yes, but “inspired by real events”. The real man behind that story was Serge Voronoff, a French surgeon who grafted monkey testicle tissue onto more than 500 men in France, until the idea was disproved.
Epidemiological numbers are generally less entertaining, but more scientific. In the United States, infections caused close to half of all deaths around 1910, and a few per cent a century later (that is, before COVID came). Heart disease and cancer, the diseases of ageing, went the other way: from about one death in eight to nearly half. In Germany in 2014, the largest age group was the 45-to-55-year-olds, ten to twenty years from retirement, in a pension system where the young pay for the old: a system everyone has known for decades will collapse, yet no one has really done much about laws designed at a time when we had a demographic pyramid. Australia was younger (still is), but on the same road. And in old age, it costs more to keep well: in one American model on my slides, a year of healthcare at 85 cost about twelve times as much as at 20.[2] My notes for this section: “I am not a policy maker, and not even a health economics expert, but somehow, this does not look very sustainable..”
Ageing, I said, was going to be disruptive. There would be change, and there would be opportunity, “for example in regenerative medicine”. A medicine takes about fifteen years from lab to patient, so 2016 was the time to start.
The last part of my talk went back to the blood. In 2005, a team at Stanford joined the circulation of old mice to young ones. The old animals’ muscle and liver cells regenerated as if they were young again.[3] Tony Wyss-Coray, also at Stanford, went on to show that the plasma alone could do part of it. “There’s a startup for this.” Two, in fact. One was Ambrosia, which infused people with plasma from young donors. The other was Alkahest, searching young plasma for the factors responsible.
“One more thing…” Blood also carries exosomes: tiny vesicles that cells release to send each other molecular cargo. That is the slide behind me in the photo. Exosome science papers were heading for about 800 that year. I set them against monoclonal antibodies, which passed 500 papers in 1980. The first antibody drug followed six years later; by 2013, antibodies were selling 75 billion US dollars a year. The slide’s title: “Exosomes – you are going to hear about them.”
PubMed now counts 673 papers with “exosome” in the title for 2016, and 2,860 for 2025. Count the field’s newer name too, “extracellular vesicles”, and the decade from 2016 to 2025 produced more than 57,000 papers, including nine of our own, from Exopharm, the company I co-founded.[4] Two have my name on them, among them the first trial in people of extracellular vesicles made from donated platelets (yes, blood platelets), for wounds that were slow to heal.[5] In June, the World Economic Forum put exosome drug delivery sixth on its list of the top ten emerging technologies of 2026, and called exosomes “the body’s own molecular couriers”.[6] Someone must have finally read our 2022 investor presentations.
Not all of it aged as well. In May 2017, HBO’s Silicon Valley gave its tech billionaire a “blood boy”, a young man on call to top him up.[7] On 19 February 2019, the US Food and Drug Administration warned that plasma from young donors had no proven clinical benefit. Within hours, Ambrosia announced that it had ceased patient treatments. It had been charging 8,000 US dollars for a litre, or 12,000 for two.[8] And no exosome medicine has yet been approved for use inside the body.[9] The first US decision on an exosome-related therapy is due on 22 November: Capricor’s deramiocel, for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Technically, it is a cell-based therapeutic, which attributes its effect to the exosomes and other extracellular vesicles its cells release.\nThe Sydney agenda has sessions on healthspan, on the economics of ageing, on 100-year lives, and on who pays. No Goethe, though, I assume.
For us, the conference comes about seven years too late.
Being early feels a lot like being wrong. Ten years later, it feels better, in a way. But feeling better doesn’t change the outcome.
I am marvelling at my slides from 2016, and at the roughly $99 that my holdings from those years are worth in 2026.
But, the experience: priceless.
Sources
Part 3 of 18 · A history of the giant freshwater prawn
Hawaii’s biggest prawn farm never made a profit.[1]
It was the Lowe Aquafarm, later Amorient Aquafarms: 150 acres by 1983, harvesting around 80 tonnes of prawns a year. In 1985, with output falling, it was reported that the farm had never made a profit. Its owners put it up for sale and went to farm marine shrimp in Ecuador instead.[1]
Hawaii had everything science could supply: the hatchery that had cracked mass production, free postlarvae for farmers, at least 24 farms by 1980, and the attention of the aquaculture press.[1] What it lacked, as Michael New of FAO put it, science could not supply: abundant sites, cheap labour, and a large home market already used to eating freshwater prawns.[1]
Thailand had all three, and an appetite to go with it. A prawn fishery ran in all its major rivers, and by the mid-1970s Thailand was exporting freshwater prawns to Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, the United States, Italy and France.[2] Even in 1983, with farms spreading fast, it still imported 700 tonnes of prawns a year, mostly from Burma.[1] The farming grew out of a fisheries station at Chachoengsao, led by Somsak Singholka, and, from 1978, a UNDP/FAO project. Together they spread prawn farming to 40 of the country’s 72 provinces by 1980, and a study that year found it profitable at every size of farm examined.[1] By 1987, a third of Thailand’s farmed prawns went to Europe.[1]
Hawaii had the science. Thailand had the customers.
The American mainland ran the same experiment with even more enthusiasm: seasonal pond farms across the South, geothermal farms in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and California, solar-heated recirculating systems in Rhode Island. Commercial production stayed, in New’s word, minimal.[1] Decades later, Louis D’Abramo of the University of Alabama at Birmingham described American prawn farming as a paradox: fifty years of research advances, and a species still “emerging”.[3]
In Taiwan, meanwhile, prawn farmers had found customers nobody had planned for: people who wanted to catch the prawns themselves.[4]
Sources
Part 3 of 18 · A history of the giant freshwater prawn · Previous: Part 2, The hatchery that gave its prawns away · Next: Part 4, The prawn you catch yourself · SHRMP.bio’s strategy behind it: shrmp.bio/strategy.html
", "image": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/113/2026-11-05-SHRMP-Feature-GFP-Part-3-1200x630.png", "author": { "name": "Gregor Lichtfuss" }, "tags": [ "The Shrimp", "SHRMP.bio" ], "date_published": "2026-11-09T10:07:00+11:00", "date_modified": "2026-11-10T09:22:04+11:00" }, { "id": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/the-hatchery-that-gave-its-prawns-away.html", "url": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/the-hatchery-that-gave-its-prawns-away.html", "title": "The hatchery that gave its prawns away", "summary": "Part 2 of 18 · A history of the giant freshwater prawn Freshwater prawn farming across the Western Hemisphere descends, almost entirely, from thirty-six prawns.[1] They arrived from Malaysia in 1965 and 1966 at the Anuenue Fisheries Research Center in Honolulu, where Takuji Fujimura and his team set about turning Shao-Wen Ling’s tank result into a production line. By 1972…", "content_html": "Part 2 of 18 · A history of the giant freshwater prawn
Freshwater prawn farming across the Western Hemisphere descends, almost entirely, from thirty-six prawns.[1]
They arrived from Malaysia in 1965 and 1966 at the Anuenue Fisheries Research Center in Honolulu, where Takuji Fujimura and his team set about turning Shao-Wen Ling’s tank result into a production line. By 1972 they had worked out how to rear postlarvae on a commercial scale, and published the method.[2][3]
Then they gave the prawns away. From 1965 onwards, a government hatchery handed out postlarvae free to farmers to stock their ponds.[2] But the stock travelled far beyond Hawaiian ponds. Successful pond trials in Hawaii were followed by attempts at commercial farming in many other places, Australia among them.[2] Guam took its prawns from Hawaii in 1974;[4] a university in Brazil imported postlarvae straight from Anuenue in 1977;[5] and from the 1970s, breeding stock from Hawaii and Thailand began to reach countries where the species is not native.[3]
Taiwan’s industry began with even fewer: a single pair. The species had turned up now and then in the rivers of southern Taiwan, but farming there grew from two adults imported from Thailand in 1970.[2] Taiwan went on to become one of the pioneers of modern prawn farming.[3]
Thirty-six is a small family to found a hemisphere on, and two is smaller. Decades later, when geneticists compared farmed and wild prawns, many of the farmed populations carried less genetic variety than wild prawns from Myanmar.[1] The generosity that spread the prawn so quickly also spread it from very few parents.
For several years, Hawaii was the place the aquaculture press associated with freshwater prawns, and in 1978 it was predicted that Hawaiian farms would be producing 1,000 tonnes a year by 1981. They produced 118.[2] Thailand, where people had long eaten the prawn, had farmed 3 tonnes in 1976. By 1987 it was farming an estimated 15,000.[2]
Sources
Part 2 of 18 · A history of the giant freshwater prawn · Previous: Part 1, The larvae that needed the sea · Next: Part 3, Science in Hawaii, an industry in Thailand · SHRMP.bio’s strategy behind it: shrmp.bio/strategy.html
", "image": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/112/2026-11-04-SHRMP-Feature-GFP-Part-2-1200x630.png", "author": { "name": "Gregor Lichtfuss" }, "tags": [ "The Shrimp", "SHRMP.bio" ], "date_published": "2026-11-06T10:03:00+11:00", "date_modified": "2026-11-10T09:21:31+11:00" }, { "id": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/the-larvae-that-needed-the-sea.html", "url": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/the-larvae-that-needed-the-sea.html", "title": "The larvae that needed the sea", "summary": "Part 1 of 18 · A history of the giant freshwater prawn A newly hatched giant freshwater prawn is just under two millimetres long, and it swims tail first, upside down.[1] What a giant to be. It hatches where the river meets the sea. A female carries her eggs, between 5,000 and 100,000 of them, in a brood chamber under…", "content_html": "Part 1 of 18 · A history of the giant freshwater prawn
A newly hatched giant freshwater prawn is just under two millimetres long, and it swims tail first, upside down.[1] What a giant to be.
It hatches where the river meets the sea. A female carries her eggs, between 5,000 and 100,000 of them, in a brood chamber under her tail for about three weeks, and travels downstream to the estuary to release them.[1] There, in brackish water, the larvae pass through eleven stages, growing to almost eight millimetres, before they change into postlarvae: small prawns that swim forwards and the right way up, having worked out, at last, which way is up. Then they head back upriver. Where the water recedes, they walk, over wet stones, up small waterfalls and weirs, even across land.[1] Quite an adventure, and not one you might expect.
For anyone trying to farm the species, that journey was the problem. People could catch young prawns in rivers and raise them in ponds. And they did, long before anyone could breed them.[2] But the larvae need the brackish water of the estuary. In fresh water, they die.[3]
The man who worked it out was Shao-Wen Ling, an expert working for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization at the Fisheries Research Institute in Penang, Malaysia, where the prawn was already prized as udang galah.[3] He took up laboratory experiments that Ariya Sidthimunka had begun in Bangkok in the 1950s.[5] In 1961 he found that the larvae of this freshwater prawn need brackish water, a mix of fresh and sea water, to survive. In 1962, rearing them in it, he succeeded. By 1963 he had enough young prawns to stock culture ponds.[4] Modern farming of the species starts there.[1]
It mattered far beyond Penang. In 1962, the marine shrimp the world already traded could not yet be bred in hatcheries at any commercial scale, so a large prawn that could be raised in a tank looked like the obvious route to farming crustaceans.[2][6]
Hatcheries still follow Ling’s water. Larvae are usually reared at about twelve parts per thousand of salt, roughly a third as salty as the sea, and most turn into postlarvae after about a month.[1]
In 1965 and 1966, Takuji Fujimura’s team took thirty-six prawns from Malaysia to a research centre in Honolulu.[7][8] Aloha.
Sources
Part 1 of 18 · A history of the giant freshwater prawn · Previous: Prologue, The giant prawn Australia hasn’t farmed (yet) · Next: Part 2, The hatchery that gave its prawns away · SHRMP.bio’s strategy behind it: shrmp.bio/strategy.html
", "image": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/111/2026-11-03-SHRMP-Feature-GFP-Part-1-1200x630.png", "author": { "name": "Gregor Lichtfuss" }, "tags": [ "The Shrimp", "SHRMP.bio" ], "date_published": "2026-11-05T10:01:00+11:00", "date_modified": "2026-11-10T09:21:08+11:00" }, { "id": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/the-giant-prawn-australia-hasnt-farmed-yet.html", "url": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/the-giant-prawn-australia-hasnt-farmed-yet.html", "title": "The giant prawn Australia hasn't farmed (yet)", "summary": "Prologue · A history of the giant freshwater prawn A large male giant freshwater prawn carries two blue claws, each about twice the length of his body.[1] Head to tail, the biggest males reach around 32 centimetres.[2] A shrimp the size of a ruler. One of ours, some way short of a ruler. Photo: SHRMP.bio The species lives in the…", "content_html": "Prologue · A history of the giant freshwater prawn
A large male giant freshwater prawn carries two blue claws, each about twice the length of his body.[1] Head to tail, the biggest males reach around 32 centimetres.[2] A shrimp the size of a ruler.
![\"A](\"https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/110/2026-11-02-SHRMP-Feature-GFP-Prologue-Photo.JPG\")
The species lives in the rivers of northern Australia, from the Kimberley to Cape York. Aboriginal people have caught and eaten it for thousands of years, and in the north it goes by local names, cherabin among them.[3] Across Asia, giant freshwater prawns are farmed at about 300,000 tonnes a year, more than half of them in China.[4] In Australia, where the prawn is native, there is no commercial production at all.[5]
I have spent nearly three years with this species. In all that time I have not found its story told anywhere in one piece. But it’s a good story.
Over the past months I wrote a series on why SHRMP.bio is not building a prawn farm, and why it is looking for a research home instead.[6] That was the why and the how. This series is the what: the species itself, seventy years of people trying to farm it, and a question about it that the industry set aside in the 1980s and never finished answering.
It comes now partly because of timing. For once, fortune has been with us: a dedicated aquaculture programme surfaced just when we were looking for one, and with it a group of people who share our enthusiasm and curiosity, and our conviction that this species could be of value to Australia. In September, SHRMP.bio joined CSIRO’s Innovate to Grow: Aquaculture, a free eight-week programme that pairs small companies with researchers to establish what research an idea needs.[7] Our coach is Associate Professor Tomer Ventura of the University of the Sunshine Coast, an expert with deep knowledge of this species, and an exceptionally helpful coach.
It is also more than SHRMP.bio’s story. The people working on this prawn in Australia are few and far apart: researchers in Townsville, Brisbane, Darwin and on the Sunshine Coast; two Aboriginal-led ventures, the Hope Vale Foundation on Cape York and Emama Nguda Aboriginal Corporation in Derby; and the programmes and funders that have backed them. The parts that follow put their work into one story, crediting each in turn.
Here is what is coming.
It begins in Penang, in 1961, with a larva that swims upside down and refuses to grow up where its parents live, and with the man who worked out what it needed. From there the prawn travels. Thirty-six of them went to Hawaii, and their descendants now stock nearly every prawn farm in the Western Hemisphere. Thailand built the business while Hawaii kept the science. In Taiwan, people paid by the hour to fish for them, and had their catch cooked on the spot.
Then the ponds start giving away their secrets. In Israel, of all places, where prawns are not kosher, researchers found that a few males run the place and keep the small ones small. Even the pond has office politics. How the bosses do it, nobody quite finished finding out, and an experiment from 1981 suggests the water itself may be carrying messages.
Meanwhile, the industry boomed, went bust and worked around the problem. India sold its prawns to Europe under an Italian name that belonged to someone else. Bangladesh learned that what goes into a pond comes out in the prawn. And the professor who ended the hand-sorting of baby prawns by sex was rewarded with a plaque and US$1,000.
To understand why the question was never answered, I went back forty years into the archives. Some finds were solid; some were dust. Down there are bosses that leapfrog each other and then stop growing, a tiny gland with a lot of say, a prawn alone in its tank making what sound like fight calls at nobody, and a party that only starts when the lights go off.
Then the story comes home. Australia has a giant prawn of its own, on the far side of the Huxley line, and pioneers of its own: an Aboriginal corporation in Derby that learned to breed it, and twenty prawns from Cape York that took a 1,900-kilometre road trip south, to return as two hundred thousand. Along the way, the prawn lost its name. Twice. Wallace had it for three years.
And at the end: what SHRMP.bio plans to do about the question nobody finished.
It starts in Penang, with a problem that defeated everyone who tried to breed the prawn until the early 1960s: its young cannot survive in the water their parents live in.
Sources
Prologue · A history of the giant freshwater prawn · Next: Part 1, The larvae that needed the sea · SHRMP.bio’s strategy behind it: shrmp.bio/strategy.html
", "image": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/110/2026-11-02-SHRMP-Feature-GFP-Prologue-1200x630.png", "author": { "name": "Gregor Lichtfuss" }, "tags": [ "The Shrimp", "SHRMP.bio" ], "date_published": "2026-11-04T10:00:00+11:00", "date_modified": "2026-11-10T09:20:44+11:00" }, { "id": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/two-fridays-on-the-bay.html", "url": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/two-fridays-on-the-bay.html", "title": "Two Fridays on the Bay", "summary": "An account of the heave-to anchoring experiments · RS Quest “Aurora” · Port Phillip, October 2026 There is a particular foolishness in setting out alone on a Friday afternoon to test a theory about anchors. The theory ran like this: that a dinghy sailed single-handed could be made to anchor itself — hove-to, parked, both hands free for the rode…", "content_html": "An account of the heave-to anchoring experiments · RS Quest “Aurora” · Port Phillip, October 2026\n![\"Image](\"https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/109/DA851AD6-93CE-4F4E-8F97-624F10FC0773_1_102_o-2.jpeg\")
The sixteenth gave me a steady southerly, ten knots, the kind of sea breeze that makes Port Phillip look briefly like somewhere you would pay to sail. I reached out, backed the jib, tucked the tiller extension into the drain at the stern, and the boat did what the books say a hove-to boat does: she stopped arguing. She lay across the wind and slid to leeward at a walking pace, quietly, waiting. I went forward to ready the anchor.
What the books leave out is how long it takes one man to clear an anchor rode he has not cleared enough times, and how completely the clearing of it occupies the part of the mind that is meant to be watching the boat. I was paying out the rode, pleased with myself, when Aurora put her mast in the water.
A capsize to port is a brisk education. There is the moment of disbelief, then the cold, then the ordinary business of standing on the centreboard and hauling her upright, which a Sea Scout does in under a minute and which I did in rather more. The anchor, for its part, had gone down and — I would learn that evening, from the track — held her within a few metres while I sorted myself out. The experiment, in other words, survived its author.
Righted, and rather quieter in my opinions, I let her lie. And she lay. The GPS, read at the kitchen table that night, told the story I had half-felt on the water: hove-to she had drifted at about a knot, a tenth of the wind; anchored, she had swung on her rode and gone nowhere worth the name. The manoeuvre worked. That I had capsized in the middle of proving it felt about right.
I went back a fortnight later to do it properly.
The forecast promised a northerly for the whole day, with the confidence forecasts keep for being wrong, and a brisk southerly met me on the deck. I spent the first while fussing with cameras — a stick-on mount that had already stuck itself off after two weeks, a suction cup I declined to trust on the grounds that it was a lost GoPro biding its time — and settled for one clamped to the tiller and one on the GNAV.
The breeze had gone soft and shifty by the time I reached the G, as if it too had read the forecast and was hedging. From the G I worked across towards St Kilda and set up the heave-to again. This time I took far too long with the lines — the rope-handling is the bottleneck of the whole business, and the bottleneck is me — but the manoeuvre itself went to plan: anchor down, rudder and centreboard up, jib rolled away, and the boat sitting to her anchor with nothing left to do but watch.
Watch I did, with the low disquiet of a man unsure his anchor is holding. The G seemed, once or twice, to be coming closer; then it seemed not to be. The track settled it afterwards, and in my favour: she had wandered seventy metres of path but come back each time, swinging on the rode rather than dragging, and the small net creep she did make ran across the wind, not down it — the tide’s signature, not a dragging anchor’s. Still, leading the rode over the side rather than the bow let the hull take the breeze beam-on and sail her about more than she needed to. Next time, from the bow.
![\"Image](\"https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/109/6F38C1A1-AB10-4447-9F38-E7D418C2307F_4_5005_c.jpeg\")
![\"Image](\"https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/109/C544BE4F-0721-4E17-B4D4-7E81BA503F2C_1_105_c.jpeg\")
Getting under way again was the same in reverse, and smooth — board and rudder down, jib out, anchor broken out and gathered in, and off. I had a mind to carry on to St Kilda for the afternoon, but the wind chose that moment to fall away, and rather than paddle home in disgrace I turned back. Closer in it kicked up again, shifty and contrary; the northerly the forecast had promised was arriving at last, leaning on the dying sea breeze, and by the time the boat was packed away it had won, and blew properly out of the north as if it had been there all day.
![Image description](f
It was a good day’s work and a slightly lonely one. The manoeuvre is a Session on the Sea by design — three on a boat, the point being the company — and I had sailed it as one, testing anchors, talking to no one, tired in the particular way solo days are tiring. I would have liked someone aboard to watch the anchoring work, maybe with a drink and snack in hand. But work it did, twice now, which is two more times than a theory is usually allowed before it has to become a technique.
There is a version of this with more weather in it — the light going gold on the water, the mast’s shadow long across it, all of that. The plainer version is the truer one, and I think the better: a man, a small boat, an anchor, and a Friday; a theory borne out; and a wind that lied about its intentions all day and then, at dusk, with nobody left afloat to care, finally told the truth.
Session On the Sea runs Fridays from Port Melbourne Yacht Club through to mid-December.
How it started: Your last meeting of the week.
", "image": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/109/6F38C1A1-AB10-4447-9F38-E7D418C2307F_1_105_c.jpeg", "author": { "name": "Gregor Lichtfuss" }, "tags": [ "Sailing Adventures", "SOS", "Field Notes", "Boat", "Aurora" ], "date_published": "2026-10-30T19:14:09+11:00", "date_modified": "2026-11-01T08:49:59+11:00" }, { "id": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/30-knots-30-degrees-30-topics-at-least.html", "url": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/30-knots-30-degrees-30-topics-at-least.html", "title": "30 knots, 30 degrees, 30 topics. At least.", "summary": "The second Session on the Sea had a crew of two, the day Linda — aka Phoenix — dared to set foot on Aurora, on a (too) warm spring afternoon of flat water and strong gusts. Linda Baird, CEO of a eucalypt-conservation trust by day and our Sea Scouts group leader for years, opened the session a day early, by…", "content_html": "The second Session on the Sea had a crew of two, the day Linda — aka Phoenix — dared to set foot on Aurora, on a (too) warm spring afternoon of flat water and strong gusts. Linda Baird, CEO of a eucalypt-conservation trust by day and our Sea Scouts group leader for years, opened the session a day early, by text: “I’m trying to pick a topic that has some optimism but I’m struggling!! It won’t be much fun.” So we started with: \nFun: a reef in the main, the jib rolled away entirely, and a personal speed record of eight knots in a gust.
The only boat out, and a quick one: Port Melbourne to St Kilda, across to Williamstown and back, two channel crossings, all before the sun came anywhere near the horizon.
If you have sailed a strong northerly in Melbourne you will know the pattern; for everyone else: the northerly brings the heat, it runs strong to very strong, and even when the wind graph reads a civilised eighteen knots it is the gust that wants watching — thirty-five, nearly seventy kilometres an hour, arriving in the same breath. The gusts come short and hard and shifty as anything, bent and deflected and blocked by the city towers standing between the bay and the north. Short, strong, wildly varied — which, it turned out, was also how our topics came: broken up by quick kicks of adrenaline, both of us out on the rail, sail eased, the odd “I think we are about to get wet” that reset the conversation each time.\nOf course we started with Scouts, and, as ever, ended up at education — Linda, as it happens, shares my view of it; it is a large part of why she took on the “little side project” of reviving 1st Victorian Sea Scouts a few years ago, from nearly forgotten to a bustling hub of adventure again. A natural enough drift, until a gust kicked us off it and I remembered to ask: “hang on — why did you say you could only think of grim topics?” Which took us straight to politics, international down to national, the real worry being the extreme polarisation of a country, and the hope that we might steer clear of the trajectory other nations are on.\nThirty degrees, a twenty-five-knot gust, the boat heeling hard. Pause.\n“Few people really doubt climate change is real by now…”\n“…but not a great deal is actually happening?”\nThat led us not into climate change itself but into conservation — caring for the land, and for its people. You know how the Indigenous people here were treated…? (something I am aware of, and no expert in). A gust cut my answer short:\n“I think I would call it genocide.”\nThis is where the session turned, for me, because I have not spent much time thinking about that history in Australia before — despite it being, this year especially, a subject of education in our own family (that is for another time). I grew up with the German experience of reckoning openly with a national history: its importance, and also its shortcomings and its pitfalls. Setting that beside other reckonings, the ones tied more to colonisation, something struck me for the first time. Australia’s may be an unusually hard case, because its history of reckoning is so recent — and, more surprising to me, so recent in becoming something the country openly learns about and discusses in public. What I, as a fairly recent arrival, had filed under “ancient history” — not quite understanding why it was still live — is not a matter of “still a topic” at all. It is much more a matter of “only just became one.” Children were still being taken from their mothers, for their “education”, within Linda’s lifetime. I knew that when I moved here. What I had not grasped is that a great deal of the country was only learning it at much the same time I was.\nA longer run of hard wind left each of us alone with our thoughts for a while, and once the boat was level again we left that one where it sat: wondering aloud whether any comparable country has worked through all of this well enough to offer the rest a bit of a map.
Crossing the channel a second time, we agreed it was a good moment to find something lighter — and arrived, instead, at the question that turns out to unite us both: how to spend one’s time making or doing something that matters. Before I could get out my answer — “I suspect you already do more than you realise” — the bow touched the beach and we were home in Port Melbourne.\nOur “summer cruise” went from “nothing fun to talk about” — truly — to the two of us, one running a trust to conserve a national icon and one trying to build something that might matter in twenty-five years, still wondering whether there is more we could be doing.
![\"Image](\"https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/108/2026-10-23-The-Plot-SOS-Session-2-The-Conversation-2.jpeg\")
Only three improvements could have made this session any better:
Aurora is out again on Friday. Reef, hopefully, optional (it was not this time).
Session On the Sea runs Fridays from Port Melbourne Yacht Club through to mid-December.
How it started: Your last meeting of the week.
", "author": { "name": "Gregor Lichtfuss" }, "tags": [ "SOS", "Field Notes", "Aurora" ], "date_published": "2026-10-26T11:12:12+11:00", "date_modified": "2026-10-30T19:14:20+11:00" }, { "id": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/first-session-on-the-sea-one-anchor-one-capsize-nobody-watching.html", "url": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/first-session-on-the-sea-one-anchor-one-capsize-nobody-watching.html", "title": "First Session on the Sea: one anchor, one capsize, nobody watching.", "summary": "The first Session on the Sea went out on Friday, with no one aboard but me. For Session on the Sea, that’s not a cancellation — it turns into a session to experiment. And this Friday, I tried to anchor, like no one has (possibly) ever tried before. What I wanted to test: anchoring the dinghy single-handed from a heave-to,…", "content_html": "The first Session on the Sea went out on Friday, with no one aboard but me.\nFor Session on the Sea, that’s not a cancellation — it turns into a session to experiment. And this Friday, I tried to anchor, like no one has (possibly) ever tried before.
What I wanted to test: anchoring the dinghy single-handed from a heave-to, and getting underway again the same way. It is a manoeuvre I have not found in a book. The conditions were right for a first try — light air, plenty of room to leeward — so I sailed out past the Spirit, hove-to, and set to work, entirely alone and quietly relieved about it — I neither would have nor could have tried it with someone else on board.
This is more interesting than it sounds. A keelboat has the one thing that makes anchoring calm: mass. It carries enough momentum to run the whole textbook manoeuvre — up into the wind, under sail, single-handed, no drama. Often the anchor sits ready on the bow with an electric winch to drop it and haul it back, or a button by the cockpit: sail up, let her stop, press, anchor down, done. Reverse the process to leave. Or you skip the sailing entirely and do it on the engine.
A five-metre dinghy has none of that. The anchor lives in the foredeck locker, if the boat even has one, and there is no mass to speak of. Point her into the wind and you have perhaps a second and a half before she is pushed off and sailing again, whether you like it or not. In theory you could heave the anchor over in that second and a half and hope — but you do not sail around with it loose and ready, because the moment you capsize it auto-deploys: falls out, sinks, takes the rode with it. And retrieving it takes a great deal longer than a second and a half, during which you are hauling rope with both hands while the boat, nobody at the tiller, quietly sails away (in the best case).
My guess is that few dinghy sailors have ever seriously considered anchoring — why would you, mid-race — which, on a small boat, single-handed, is just enough of a juggling act that most people sensibly don’t. Which may be why I have not found it written down anywhere.
But adventure is the point, and we have anchored Aurora in some beautiful bays already — the land version: beach her, unload, walk her out into the shallows, set the anchor. And that has always meant a swim. If one day we want to stop for a swim on a warm afternoon, or just drift and talk, or even put a line over the side, being able to anchor without getting wet would come in handy. Not quite this time, evidently.
The first attempt worked, nearly. Line round the mast, made fast “inside”, anchor fed out and down and biting; the boat slowed to almost nothing. But not quite still: she was sailing on the anchor, the rode angling back off the side rather than leading cleanly from the bow, so instead of lying quiet she sat there fidgeting, half-held. To fix it I reached forward under the stays to take the rode to the bow with a bungee and clip — leaning, as I did, out over the side the line ran — which, it turned out, was one degree past what the boat was prepared to put up with. She did not protest. She simply, politely, lay down, waited for me to slide off the foredeck, and tipped me into the bay.
Fifteen degrees, the water, and a good deal earlier in the afternoon than I had planned to be in it — which, ideally, was not at all.\n![\"Image](\"https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/106/2026-10-17-The-Plot-SOS-Session-1-The-Anchor-3.jpeg\")
![\"Image](\"https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/106/2026-10-17-The-Plot-SOS-Session-1-The-Anchor-4.jpeg\")
Righting a dinghy is the part that’s either feared (by many adults) or loved (by nearly all kids), but it’s (usually) nothing dramatic — free yourself, hang off the centreboard, wait for her to come back up — and she came up anchored, as it happened, in precisely the spot I had been trying to anchor her. The one part of the plan that went perfectly, I achieved by falling in. The lesson arrived while I sat dripping back on board, reconstructing my own downfall: the likely culprit was the rudder, still down. Still in the water, still steering, still gamely trying to sail a boat that was doing its best to stay put. I lifted it up, and the scene went quiet and true — the stable hold I had been after.\n![\"Image](\"https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/106/2026-10-17-The-Plot-SOS-Session-1-The-Anchor-2.jpeg\")
Weighing anchor, by contrast, was undramatic: jib out to feel the load, a hard haul to break it free, the boat falling back into her hove-to drift, everything stowed, sail made again. Then an hour of the low late-afternoon sail that is the reward for all of it — the light low on the water, the city going gold behind, the boat, now that I had stopped arguing with it, doing the simple thing beautifully.
![\"Image](\"https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/106/2026-10-17-The-Plot-SOS-Session-1-The-Anchor-1-2.jpeg\")
Session one, sailed. A manoeuvre I now know how to do — dry, next time, with luck — a reason I now understand it went wrong, a few ideas for improving it, and a damp but durable reminder that a rudder keeps steering for exactly as long as it is in the water.
Aurora goes out again next Friday — for deep thoughts or deep dives. Possibly both.
Session On the Sea runs Fridays from Port Melbourne Yacht Club through to mid-December.
How it started: Your last meeting of the week.
", "image": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/106/2026-10-17-The-Plot-SOS-Session-1-The-Anchor-1.jpeg", "author": { "name": "Gregor Lichtfuss" }, "tags": [ "SOS", "Field Notes", "Boat", "Aurora" ], "date_published": "2026-10-20T09:46:00+11:00", "date_modified": "2026-10-20T09:46:00+11:00" }, { "id": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/for-nearly-three-years-shrmpbio-looked-for-the-help-a-company-like-ours-needs-australias-agrifood-leaders-have-now-diagnosed-why-we-couldnt-find-it.html", "url": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/for-nearly-three-years-shrmpbio-looked-for-the-help-a-company-like-ours-needs-australias-agrifood-leaders-have-now-diagnosed-why-we-couldnt-find-it.html", "title": "For nearly three years SHRMP.bio looked for the help a company like ours needs. Australia's agrifood leaders have now diagnosed why we couldn't find it.", "summary": "“We are still mainly crops and rocks; we don’t have a sophisticated food manufacturing sector.” One of the more than a hundred people consulted for a national report on Australian agrifood said that, and the report’s own numbers do not argue. Australia ranks seventy-fourth of a hundred and forty-five countries on Harvard’s Economic Complexity Index — down from sixty-first in…", "content_html": "“We are still mainly crops and rocks; we don’t have a sophisticated food manufacturing sector.”
One of the more than a hundred people consulted for a national report on Australian agrifood said that, and the report’s own numbers do not argue. Australia ranks seventy-fourth of a hundred and forty-five countries on Harvard’s Economic Complexity Index — down from sixty-first in 2012, and second-lowest in the OECD.[^src] Manufacturing has fallen to 5.1 per cent of GDP, the lowest in the OECD. And Australia exports seventy-one per cent of its agricultural output as commodities, in the report’s words, “for offshore customers to convert into higher-value products.” We grow it, ship it, and buy back what someone else made of it.
The report is A Systems Thinking Approach to Australian Agrifood, published in September by the Australian Agrifood System Alliance and commissioned by AgriFutures Australia with the support of GRDC. Its authors include a CSIRO board member, a former managing director of the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation, evokeAG’s programme lead, and people from Meat & Livestock Australia, KPMG, Deloitte and McKinsey. It drew on more than a hundred consultations and a workshop of two hundred people. It is not about any one industry. It is about how the system around all of them is organised.
Its diagnosis fits in three words from one of its own headings: program-rich, system-poor. Fifteen research and development corporations, a crowd of CRCs, hubs and agencies, and, across government, more than two hundred research and innovation programmes spread over more than a dozen portfolios. Each does useful work; the effort, the report says, “does not always compound into national outcomes.” The same barriers recur in every area it examined: levy rules that reward near-term, commodity-specific outputs; funding cycles shorter than the problems they fund; “no accountable steward and no clear entry point.” Innovation stalls between pilot and adoption. And the cost of navigating all of it falls hardest, the report notes, on “small and medium enterprises looking for an obvious front door.”
That sentence describes nearly three years of SHRMP.bio: a small company with a long-horizon biology programme, passed politely from one part of the system to the next, each explaining — reasonably — that the project belonged somewhere else. The report calls it structural.
Where the report points, it points the same way our strategy does. The countries that outrank Australia, it finds, have built the architecture that converts agricultural strength “into value-added products, manufactured exports, patented intellectual property and sovereign capability.” Its priority missions include sovereign food systems and domestic value creation. It names advanced protein manufacturing among Australia’s untapped capabilities. One contributor put the security argument in nine words: “Agriculture should be on the same footing as defence.” And the report’s map of who makes up Australian agrifood lists, among the core producers, “genetics and breeding providers” — the layer underneath every farm that SHRMP.bio is trying to build.
Aquaculture appears in the report twice: once in the definition of what the agrifood system includes, and once as a line on that same map. It is not among the six national challenges, the six priority missions or the eight recommendations, and the only seafood model in the report is a foreign one — Norway’s seafood innovation cluster, one of eighteen international examples. It is the second national document I have read this year in which aquaculture is in scope and out of sight.
The report’s first mission is renewable energy and bioeconomy; it scored highest of the candidates, thirty of thirty-five, and it is a sensible place to start. Its recommended horizon is seven to ten years. Its last recommendation is a national coordination function to serve as the “durable front door” the system does not yet have. Until that door exists, a company building breeding IP for 2050 needs a research home that can carry the work across the gap the report describes, between pilot and adoption. That is what we are looking for.
The report closes on a contributor’s line: “This is too important to just be another report. Let’s get moving.”
Agreed. SHRMP.bio — and, I am sure, aquaculture — would like to come along.
[^src]: A Systems Thinking Approach to Australian Agrifood, Australian Agrifood System Alliance (commissioned by AgriFutures Australia with GRDC), September 2026. Economic Complexity Index figures are the report’s citation of the Harvard Growth Lab’s Atlas of Economic Complexity (Atlas 10.0); manufacturing share and the 71% commodity export share (ABARES 2020) are as reported. Quotations are from the report and its consultation verbatims.
One of a series on how SHRMP.bio reasoned its way to its strategy.
", "image": "https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/105/2026-10-17-SHRMP-Feature-Three-Years-Doors-1200x630.png", "author": { "name": "Gregor Lichtfuss" }, "tags": [ "Strategy", "SHRMP.bio", "Field Notes" ], "date_published": "2026-10-19T12:59:00+11:00", "date_modified": "2026-10-19T12:59:00+11:00" } ] }![https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/109/77C3C19D-C6FC-413E-9BE7-4685E63A52D3_4_5005_c.jpeg](\"https://lichtfuss.earth/plot/media/posts/109/77C3C19D-C6FC-413E-9BE7-4685E63A52D3_4_5005_c.jpeg\"){kind=link}