Will Van Dorp, Tugster Photo: Brian Luster

One of my favorite blogs is Will van Dorp’s Tugster : a water blog – part shipspotting, part anthropology and part wry commentary on life and the universe, Will and his omnipresent camera do a great job covering New York’s “six borough.”   Those who know New York might note that there are only five boroughs – Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx.  The Tugster blog covers the sixth  –  the great harbor and the network of waterways that separate and also bind together the great city of New York.   Yesterday, the New York Times took note of Will’s work on Tugster:

A Blog for the ‘Sixth Borough’

Tugster, a blog by Will Van Dorp covering the city’s harbor through daily, photograph-filled posts, seems at first to be a narrow alcove geared toward seafaring captains or tugboat aficionados. Yet Mr. Van Dorp, who began Tugster in 2006 as a “working water vessel ethnology,” has attracted a broad audience. Professional mariners and landlocked lawyers alike, he said, are drawn in by his enthusiasm for “the sixth borough,” his nickname for New York’s waterways.

Part of Tugster’s appeal is the varied tone and focus of Mr. Van Dorp’s posts. “Some are technical, some are historical, some are whimsical, some provide a journey,” he said. “I like to think I can draw the whimsy-focused people in to the technical parts of the harbor and vice versa.” On a given week, visitors might encounter a poetic ode to a favorite tug named Alice; a photo-identification challenge called “Whatzit?”; and detailed primers on ship hulls or ice-breaking.

Whatever he posts, Mr. Van Dorp prioritizes interaction with his audience. He frequently replies on comment threads and highlights readers’ experiences and observations. Photographs of “things I or others don’t understand,” for example, quickly receive a crowd-sourced explanation. That, he said, is what makes Tugster a real New York blog. “We like to learn and get things right,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re an expert or a novice; that’s the magic of the Internet.”

BEHIND THE SCREEN:  Mr. Van Dorp, 59, who described himself as “the Jane Goodall of tugboats,” said he was born into his love for New York Harbor. His parents, Dutch immigrants, came over on a ship from Rotterdam to Hoboken in 1949 and often recounted to him their exhilarating first glimpse of Lady Liberty.