Samuel McLennan (Class of 1994) Building a Boat from Waste
Posted on August 8, 2025
In some ways, Samuel McLennan (1994) can thank his birth father Stephen for the idea. Samuel had returned to Tasmania from Sydney in 2020, hoping to heal after a relationship breakup and an awareness that his coaching business, while helping clients, was not attracting new ones. He says he was complaining after the Tasmanian government rejected his idea to convert the decommissioned Mirambeena Ferry into an “innovation island” – anchored in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel and repurposed with dining, planting, and spaces for leadership and entrepreneurship courses. Stephen asked him: “Why not build an innovation island yourself, out of fish farm debris? There’s plenty of that around.”
And he started, with a piece of plastic pulled in from the sea. “It was about being open like a child, just playing,” says Samuel of learning to build from waste, “working out what bits go together, what bits don’t, and how I could combine bits to make them stronger.” A few months in, he had a vision of himself on an ocean, sailing on this thing made from rubbish. “I thought, I’m not building an island, I’m building a boat.”
People told him it was insane, but others urged him to keep going. In April 2024, after 18 months building on land and another six building on water, and a to-and-fro with Marine and Safety Tasmania, he set sail from Hobart. The 27-foot Heart sits on 22 black buoys, from fish and oyster farms, that are similar to 40-gallon drum barrels, as well as dozens of white polyurethane buoys. The super-black sailing vessel ”looks like she’s out of a Mad Max movie,” says Samuel, who constructed her from bits including pipes, ropes and nets from fish farms, fishing ropes, oyster bags, tarpaulins and plastic sheets.
At the time of talking to Friends’, Samuel had been at sea for about 16 months and was sailing along the coast of Victoria, coming to shore to present at community and environmental organisations, and mentoring business-owners from his boat. Samuel, whose resumé includes studying science at UTAS, operating his own tourism business, and working in venture capital, the Australian Army and the not-for-profit sector, sees a direct correlation between poor mental health and an increasingly polluted environment. He’s spoken at five schools in the previous five weeks, emphasising to children that the first step in caring for the planet was to care for their own health and wellbeing, “because if you nurture yourself, you naturally nurture your environment.”
He expects to reach his goal of sailing to Sydney in 2026, but it’s possible he’ll continue further up Australia’s coast. “I’m open,” he says. “I’ve ended up building my own home that floats and I’ve never built a boat before in my life. But the personal satisfaction I’ve developed through building this vessel has been phenomenal.”
