Olympic boat’s visit buoys Littlehampton, the town torch forgot

Hundreds of people braved torrential rain to take a close look at Collective Spirit, a remarkable wooden yacht which is also a floating treasury of precious objects, all with a story to tell.

Thin slices of more than 1,200 donated items, from tennis racquets to rolling pins and from half a toilet seat to a fragment of a Jimi Hendrix guitar, are laminated onto the hull.

Bad weather prevented the yacht from sailing to Littlehampton from her overnight berth at Gosport, so instead she arrived by trailer.

It turned out, however, to be very much the silver lining to the cloudburst, as everyone could have a much closer inspection of the extraordinary vessel on dry land than would have been possible had she been moored in the harbour.

Among the objects contributed to the Boat Project was part of a cot used by three generations of an Arundel family, a section of hand rail from the oldest building at The Littlehampton Academy, and a log from a tree which was felled to make way for the school’s new building.