Articles
Venturing: The skipper’s log
A lifelong interest in boats and going places on board them has brought me into contact with lots of writing on the subject. Invariably, the authors of these accounts (most are about voyages in small vessels to faraway places) reflect at some point on their relationship with the larger world, or at least how their
Venturing: A helping hand
FORTUNE, Newfoundland-a visit to eastern Canada can be an object lesson in politics and the assumptions we bring to them. When the Canadian federal government, after years of failed efforts to manage the nation’s magnificent stocks of cod on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, finally closed down the fishery in the 1980s, outports like Fortune
Venturing
A friend invited me to take a tour of Portland Harbor recently. The resulting 90-minute ride in a small outboard skiff was particularly illuminating for me, since I’d never had a close-up, water-level look at this interesting corner of Maine. Portland’s not a cruising destination like towns further Downeast, and while it’s fairly easy to
Venturing
On my wall I have a large-scale reproduction of a newspaper column written 15 years ago by the late Ed Myers, who was a regular contributor to Working Waterfront for more than a decade. Ed wrote about many things – the tricky business of aquaculture, the activities of a “wharfinger” (he was one), the connections
Venturing
Go out in a boat on a June afternoon and you might notice something: how few commercial vessels you encounter in the span of a few hours. I’ll dispense with the exceptions right away-lobster boats and ferries are as plentiful as ever on Casco and Penobscot Bays-but otherwise, the amount of water-borne commerce is small
Barge-borne refinery sections make voyage from Maine to Texas
A second load of oil-refinery “modules” left Brewer in mid-June, bound for the Gulf of Mexico. Built at the Cianbro Corporation’s Eastern Manufacturing Facility in Brewer, the four modules were loaded onto a barge that was to be towed 2,300 miles to the Motiva refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. The barging is by Columbia Coastal
Venturing
The final leg of a northerly voyage along the East Coast includes the run from Annapolis to Maine. I had moored my boat in Annapolis for 10 days back in April to await the availability of a crew for this trip, and-just as important-the arrival of spring at my destination. Compared to a years-long whaling
Venturing
The Ditch The deadline for this column being April 15 it’s hard not to associate it with taxes, particularly the federal kind that are much in the news these days as the Obama administration does its best to spend its way out of our current recession/depression. A newspaper headline in Morehead City, N.C., announced that
Dick Jones and the Jones Fruit Co.
Tucked away amidst the pages of marinas, anchorages, bascule bridges and other points listed in my “Cockpit Cruising Handbook” to the Intracoastal Waterway is this notation for Mile 945 on Florida’s east coast: “Jones Fruit Dock … purchase some fruit and you can stay overnight for a nominal charge. 15-amp. electricity may be available.” Intriguing,
Column: Venturing
It’s appropriate that this column appears only in Working Waterfront’s web edition; it’s about spending your and my tax dollars to beef up the nation’s economy by improving its infrastructure, and these days, a substantial amount of the beefing-up should be occurring in cyberspace-where the web edition of this newspaper resides. As some know, I’ve