Your last meeting of the week
07 October 2026
Your last meeting of the week, and not the kind you are picturing. No boardroom, no deck, no cocktail. A small sailing boat on Port Phillip Bay, one big problem each, and quite possibly a stranger sitting next to you. That is the plan for the final calendar entry for Friday afternoon - a Session on the Sea
Background - Part 1
There is some (a fair amount) of thinking behind it. The first part started with a humble question: By now, I have run at least four student projects with Aurora being the Industry Partner at Swinburne and Monash. Most of the students have never sailed. They have never been out on the boat they have been reading about — about the water, the activities, the adventures, small and big. Regardless, they got so excited about it that they contributed beyond my expectations. At some point in a meeting, one group concluded that they had read enough about it. “Gregor, could we come and try?” Of course! And here’s the easiest way I could come up with to enable this.
Background - Part 2
But the idea behind the Session on the Sea has a second part. That evolved from a text message from a friend: “Gregor, my daughter is in town - do you want to go sailing tomorrow afternoon?” Well, my calendar is full; it’s the middle of winter, and the forecast looks sketchy (at best). “Sure! Let’s do it, just be ready to get wet and cold, see you at 15:00 at the club”.
The weather was different to the forecast (of course - part of the reason why I built my own real-time wind map now). And not only did we have a great time on the boat, we also had a great conversation. A conversation that brought together, for me, a friend, a student I had not met before, different generations, and very different perspectives. It started where these things do — “what are you up to at the moment?” (I was about to take part in the Education Symposium) — and worked its way through several tacks and gybes and the odd wave over the bow to artificial intelligence, and the real fear underneath it: not the machine potentially taking away jobs, but people trusting it blindly. From there to modern propaganda, and from there, somehow, to a translated Hitler speech that was unsettling, not because it was obviously monstrous, but because the conclusion many commenters came to was that he sounded “like a reasonable guy”. Which is where my thoughts on education and a student’s fear of AI arrived at Viktor Frankl, and finally at the foreword to Frankl’s Yes to Life: Daniel Goleman notes that spotting a “Big Lie” was once a homework assignment in 1950s California civics classes, and has long since vanished from the curriculum. Maybe something to pull from the drawer, update for modern times, and quietly reintroduce?
Well, I had not expected that when we pushed the boat into the waves to set off. But it added a level of meaning to the outing that made those three hours better spent than literally anything in my diary that week.
And I was wondering if it could be repeated. With a different crew from different walks of life, ages, backgrounds, perspectives, and big thoughts they are carrying around.
Session on the Sea
And that is what Session on the Sea is: a small adventure, an opportunity, an experiment. Open to anyone willing to embark on it — anyone ready to end a week of Zoom-call binging in the real world, with real people, having a real conversation. Or just to have some fun, which is also permitted.
The Version 1 format, for the first season:
A standing Friday sail on Port Phillip Bay, from Port Melbourne Yacht Club. I will be there no matter what; it is your choice to hit the button and request a seat. That is the only qualification it asks for — not sailing experience, of which none is required, and not a reason.
Three people on a boat: me, and up to two others who have, ideally, never met — from different lines of work, or different corners of a life. I don’t mind if you are ten or a hundred, but you will need to survive two hours in the “comforts” of a small boat. Some agility helps. It will almost certainly get wet.
Everyone brings one topic. We sail and talk, weather permitting, and afterwards I write a short paragraph for a public log, with a photo, if you are happy to be in it.
It is not a cruise, a course, or a networking event. It is two hours on the water for you — a little more for me, once I have driven down and rigged the boat — with a stranger, and your hands too full to reach your phone. If the weather is bad… we will deal with that, too.
The Sessions run Fridays at three in the afternoon, from Port Melbourne Yacht Club — nine of them, between the middle of October and the middle of December.
If this has done to you what a few pages of reading did to a group of students who had never touched a boat, request a seat. I confirm each one by hand, so it may take a day or two.