The West Australian Football League is an Australian rules football league based in Perth, Western Australia. The WAFL is the third-most popular league in the nation, behind the nationwide Australian Football League and South Australian National Football League; the league consists of ten teams, which play each other in a 20-round season lasting from March to September, with the top five teams playing off in a finals series, culminating in a Grand Final. The league runs reserves and women’s competitions; the WAFL was founded in 1885 as the West Australian Football Association, has undergone a variety of name changes since re-adopting its current name in 2001. For most of its existence, the league was considered one of the traditional "big three" Australian rules football leagues, along with the Victorian Football League and South Australian National Football League. However, since the introduction of two Western Australia-based clubs into the VFL – the West Coast Eagles in 1987 and the Fremantle Football Club in 1995 – the popularity and standard of the league has decreased to the point where it is considered a feeder competition to the AFL.

Although payments are made to players, it is considered to be a semi-professional competition. A salary cap of A$200,000 per club is in place; the league is affiliated with the two Western Australia-based AFL clubs. Players who are not selected to play with their respective AFL clubs instead play for allocated clubs in the WAFL; the competition is governed by the West Australian Football Commission, based at Subiaco Oval. There are ten teams that compete in the WAFL: a Claremont played at the Claremont Showground from 1925 to 1927 and again from 2014 until 2016 when Claremont Oval was closed for re-development, at Subiaco Oval from 1945 to 1947 when Claremont Oval was being rebuilt after a grandstand fire in 1944. B East Fremantle played at Fremantle Oval from 1898 to 1952, excluding a period in 1906 where home games were played at East Fremantle Oval. C East Perth played at Wellington Square from 1902 to 1909, at Perth Oval from 1910 to 1987 and from 1990 to 1999, at the WACA Ground during 1988 and 1989.

D Perth played at the WACA Ground from 1899 to 1958 and during 1987 and 1988. E Subiaco played at Shenton Park between 1901 and 1905, at Mueller Park in 1906 and 1907, at Subiaco Oval from 1908 to 2003. F West Perth played at Leederville Oval from 1915 to 1993. Ten other clubs competed in the competition: Fremantle Football Club was known as Unions Football Club from 1886 to 1889.a Up until the turn of the century, there were a limited number of grounds available for use by the clubs, with all clubs sharing the different grounds. As such, the Esplanade Park and Fremantle Park in Fremantle, the Old Recreation Ground and the New Recreation Ground in Perth were all used as "home" grounds by the above teams. B The High School withdrew from the competition due to lack of players two rounds into the inaugural season. C Rovers were a "wandering" team – they had no home ground, drew players from all over the metropolitan area. D West Australian Football Club merged with Victorians in 1889 to form the Metropolitan Football Club, which in turn became the West Perth Football Club.

The WAFL has a salary cap in place. In 2016 the Total Player Payments cap is $294,000 for the non-AFL aligned clubs, while the cap for East Perth and Peel Thunder is $191,100. In January 2015, the WAFL executive announced. Under the arrangement, Seven agreed to a three-year deal involving the telecast of 18 home and away matches as well as all Finals matches, broadcast throughout Western Australia; the WAFL match of the round was broadcast on ABC throughout Western Australia every Saturday afternoon during the regular home and away season. Matches were replayed nationwide on-demand from the ABC iView service and re-broadcast on the ABC2 channel early Friday morning at 2.30 am local time. Radio stations which cover the competition include 720 ABC Perth, ABC Grandstand Digital, 91.3 SportFM, 107.3 HFM and KIX Country Digital. The current naming rights partner of the WAFL is Telecommunications Company Optus and the competition is known as the "Optus WAFL Premiership". Optus were a premier partner of the WAFC and in 2019 took over the naming rights held by McDonald's and before that AAMI.

Attendance at WAFL matches dropped when each of the two Western Australian based AFL teams entered the league. In recent years, however the attendances have increased with 2009 recording the first combined annual attendance of more than 200,000 since 1994. A largest recent crowd was 24,638 at the 2010 WAFL Grand Final between Swan Districts and Claremont at Subiaco Oval; the all-time attendance record is 52,781 in 1979 for East Fremantle v South Fremantle at Subiaco Oval. Patrons at the WAFL pay at the gates; the following are the most recent attendance figures. Source: WAFL Fixtures & Results Organised football in the Perth/Fremantle region of Western Australia dates back to 1881. Back though rugby union was the dominant football code, with only one senior club, "Unions", playing Australian Rules. In 1883 a second club, "Swans", but Australian Rules' growth remained much subdued compared to that of Victoria and South Australia. However, in those days many young men of Perth's wealthier families were educated in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia.

On returning home from there they wished to play the sport they'd grown up with and no doubt exert

The Archer class is a class of patrol and training vessel in service with the United Kingdom's Royal Navy referred to as a Fast Training Boat. Most are assigned to University Royal Naval Units, although HMS Tracker and HMS Raider are armed and provide maritime force protection to high value shipping in the Firth of Clyde and are most employed as escorts for submarines transiting to Faslane. Ten vessels were ordered as the P2000 class, based on a design of an Omani coastguard cutter, from Watercraft Marine, they are twin-shaft vessels with moulded glass-reinforced plastic hulls of 54 tonnes displacement. After that company went into liquidation, the balance of the order was completed by Vosper Thornycroft; the Archers were used as Royal Navy patrol craft and as training tenders for the Royal Naval Reserve and University Royal Naval Units. Four identical vessels were ordered for the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service as Example-class tenders; when that service was disbanded in 1994, the Examples were transferred to the Royal Navy for similar duties as their Archer-class brethren.

Until 2005, the four Examples were still painted with a black hull. In 1998 two additional vessels of this design were commissioned into the Royal Navy from Ailsa Shipbuilding Company, to replace HMS Loyal Watcher and HMS Loyal Chancellor as URNU training vessels for the two newest URNUs, serving Cambridge and Oxford Universities respectively; this brought the total of Archer class vessels in the Royal Navy to sixteen, of which fourteen form the 1st Patrol Boat Squadron, each one attached to an URNU under the command of a Lieutenant. The remaining two vessels, having formed the Cyprus Squadron from 2003 to 2010, URNU vessels before that, returned to the UK in April 2010 to form the Faslane Patrol Boat Squadron, performing security duties within HMNB Clyde. In 2012 Dasher and Pursuer were replaced by Raider and Tracker - these can be identified by a number of pintle-mounted L7 7.62 mm GPMG machine guns and armour plating. Ranger and Trumpeter were formerly allocated to the Gibraltar Squadron for guard ship and search and rescue duties, but were replaced by the dedicated Scimitar class.

These two ships were used during the Thames River Pageant, escorting the Royal Barge during the Queens Diamond Jubilee. Unlike the remainder of the class, both these ships remain capable of being mounted with a 20 mm cannon on the fo'c'sle; the NATO designation of a P2000 is "PBR", denoting a "Patrol Boat - Riverine and Harbours". Harbour Defence Motor Launch - World War II equivalent CB90 class fast assault craft Patrol Craft Fast - the "Swift Boats" "Patrol Boats - Archer class". Royal Navy

Damian Dressick is an American author from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dressick is the author of the novel 40 Patchtown, the story collection Fables of the Deconstruction, his story “Four Hard Facts about Water” appeared in New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, an anthology published by W. W. Norton in 2019. Dressick’s fiction work has appeared in many literary journals, including the New Delta Review, McSweeneys, failbetter, Post Road, HeartWood Literary Journal, New Orleans Review, CutBank, Hot Metal Bridge, New World Writing, SmokeLong Quarterly, Barcelona Review, Hobart, he has published essays in Connotation Press. Dressick teaches writing at Clarion University, where he helps curate Clarion's Visiting Writers Series, he has taught writing at the University of Pittsburgh, Robert Morris University, Pennsylvania State University. He taught "Writing the 1000 Word Story" at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, he was a residency fellow at the Blue Mountain Center and the Orchard Keeper Writers Residency Program.

He serves as fiction editor for the Northern Appalachia Review, was a founding curator of Pittsburgh’s UPWords Reading Series. Dressick earned an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh, holds a PhD in English from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, with concentrations in Creative Writing, Contemporary Literature and Postcolonial Literature. In 2008 and 2009 Dressick was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for short fiction, he is the winner of the Spire Press 2009 Prose Chapbook Contest for his collection Fables of the Deconstruction. In 2007 he won the Harriette Arnow Award for short fiction. In 2018 he won the Jesse Stuart Prize and was a Finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction