More than thirty years ago, I sat on the rotting planks of the old Pier 17 in the East River in Manhattan and listened to Bernie Clay and the X-Seaman’s Institute sing a song about the schooner Alice S. Wentworth. The song became known as the “Alice Wentworth.” I only recently learned the song was originally titled “Old Zeb“, and was written by Larry Kaplan.
The song is about Zebulon Northrup Tilton, the famous skipper of the coasting schooner Alice S. Wentworth. Captain Tilton was one of the last coastal schoonermen. Before the interstate highways shifted the cargo to trucks, Zeb Tilton carried everything from lumber, to bricks, to coal, to oysters and anything else that needed to be moved from Maine to New Jersey on the Alice S. Wentworth.
On New Year’s Eve, in 20-foot seas and high winds, the 130′ crab boat 
The 
Today, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the US Navy officially named the newest of the future 
Congratulations to 
Will the Titanic II ever be built? And if so, when will it sail?
On Tuesday around 3:35 PM the Coast Guard in Galveston, TX was notified that a fishing boat, the 82′ long 
We are having a relatively warm January with significantly fluctuating temperatures. Similar weather conditions 101 years ago, coupled with a shoddily built storage tank, caused the Great Boston Molasses Flood, which inundated Boston’s North End sending a wall of molasses, killing 21 and injuring 150. A repost about the tragedy.
There are so few well-done documentary series involving ships and the sea that it seems worth pointing out that the excellent 
Six years ago, 
One of the better ways to tell if a model works at predicting the future is to run it in reverse to see how well it predicts the past. Climate change models so far have had their limitations. Most current 
In addition to more than 24 people who have died in the terrible Australian bushfires, an incredible number of animals have also perished. Estimates of wildlife deaths range from 
The Winter 2020 edition of 
Good ideas are rarely new. Container ships revolutionized liner shipping in the 1960s and 70s. Nevertheless, the idea of carrying cargo in easily handled standardized containers goes back at least 2,000 years.