Springtime is here, and our harbour city is transformed into a harbour cruise city. The Funkdafied crew who put on the Harbour Funk cruise know a thing or two about just how to make that transformation work, and as a result, if you were anywhere other than on this boat on Sunday, I’ll give you pretty short odds that I was having more fun than whatever it was that you were doing.

Once you have ascertained that you are, indeed, in a harbour city, the next thing you need for a harbour cruise is a boat. If you have a three deck catamaran, like the Lady Rose, you can have three decks of music – say, for example, reggae (and dancehall and soca and such) on the top deck, hip hop on the middle deck, and funk on the lower deck. And of course, if you put together a diverse range of music, you’ve got a good chance of attracting a diverse (although uniformly friendly) crowd. All you have to do then is to hope that the weather goes your way (which it did) and that the beer is cold (which it was) and you’ve got a pretty good chance of scoring a high distinction in Harbour Cruises 101.

The beauty of having a diverse music line-up, of course, is that if you don’t like what you are hearing, you can wander off to hear something else (not that there was too much not to like, although at one point I stepped up onto the top deck to hear the auto-tuned lyric, “Shawty, I’d take a bullet for you”, which caused me to think, “Hmm, this is not the floor I’m looking for”). However the top deck started brilliantly with the some superbly summery sounds form Nick Toth (flanked by both Australian and Jamaican flags, naturally), and I enjoyed quite a bit of sunshine before the need to wander kicked in. It was then off down to the bottom deck to hear Ari Rose, supremo of Byron Bay’s Mighty Highness Recordings, laying down some funk. Wandering was also was also made easier by the fact that Funkdafied had taken a sensible view about capacity, and this meant room on the dance floor as well as on the stairs between decks.

Next on the ground floor was Dojo Cuts featuring Roxie Ray, who I’ve been meaning to catch for a while and only today managed to see. They sit at the rawer end of the live funk/soul spectrum – and raw is no criticism; not every piece of fine timber needs thirty coats of varnish. Roxie Ray has a voice capable of exceptional dynamic and emotional range, and with trumpet and saxophone providing a counterpoint to a very dialled-in rhythm section, this is an act I’ll certainly be seeing again.

Funkdafied impresario and all-around good guy John “JC” Cawley took over the decks once Dojo Cuts finished, and at that point it emerged that we had a crew of breakdancers on board – the Street Kulture Breakers, or SKB crew. JC laid down the beats and the SKB guys danced, popped and spun, with the space to bust out some very impressive moves. It was all the better for being completely unexpected – again, one of those touches that really made Harbour Funk a top shelf afternoon.

For the next little while it was back into wander mode, taking in tunes along the way from Sydney stalwarts Gian Arpino and Russ Dewbury and San Francisco’s DJ Shortkut, before it was time to go back to the ground floor for the album launch set by Melbourne’s Deep Street Soul (much better to launch an album on a harbour than in, say, a desert, after all). You don’t get your debut album released on Freestyle Records unless you’ve got the skills to pay the bills, and I can’t see Deep Street Soul having too many unpaid bills.

Their sound has Hammond funk at its heart, and Monique Boggia plays the keys with so much power that she’s probably got her own entry in the Emissions Trading Scheme legislation. Guitar, bass and drums round things out, and with the addition of singer Shirley Davis, they had things cooking all the way back to the dock. As with Dojo Cuts, credit should also be given to the man behind the mixing desk – there are obviously quite a few difficulties in getting a live band sounding right in a room noted more for its nautical than acoustic qualities, and both Dojo Cuts and Deep Street Soul sounded very good in that room.

And so, as we trooped off the boat, a stunning spring day was coming to an end. We had great music and weather, a friendly crowd, and that certain extra something – and I don’t know quite what that was, but it sure was funky.