Northwest Maritime: A Connection to Craft and Sea

Northwest Maritime was born from the wooden boat renaissance of the 1970s, we connect people to craft, place, and sea. What began as a campfire gathering of boatbuilders is now...

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Doing the Work of Sustainability: Schooner Apollonia

Schooner Apollonia celebrates her fifth season of sail freight on the Hudson River.

Learn more about the 77-year-old schooner’s mission to reawaken sustainable windshipping.

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The Schooner Adventuress

A National Historic Landmark, the Adventuress has seen many lives in her century at sea. She now resides as a vessel for maritime education with the nonprofit Sound Experience in...

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Sailing The Inside Passage on The Raven

We ran into Naomi Spar on the piers of Sitka, AK, while they were driving their adventure touring bike over the dock onto the worn deck of their sailboat, a...

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Rum, Sailors, & Pirates: the dark history of booze on the High Seas

The spoils of captured merchantmen vessels often yielded large cargos of rum, wine, and ale, which pirate crews put to good use. Ironically, these periods of mass intoxication would last...

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Taking a Closer Look at Kon-Tiki

Thor Heyerdahl was a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer with a background in zoology, botany and geography. Heyerdahl is notable for his Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, in which he sailed 8,000...

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Pacific Fishermen Shipyard: The Origins of Ballard’s Oldest Working Shipyard

Pacific Fishermen Inc., or “PacFish,” as it is known to the many boat builders, ship crews, employees, family members and stakeholders in the Ballard community, can be traced directly back...

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How To's

How to Repair a Ripped Sail at Sea

You hear a sound you shouldn’t. Standing at the helm, getting a good look forward is tricky through rigging, mast, and mainsail. But that long ripping sound was not a...

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How To's

How to Tie 5 Sailing Knots Recommended by US Sailing

“Tie me a figure 8”, “grab that cleat hitch”, “fasten a bowline” – next time you’re aboard or at the docks, make yourself useful to the captain and crew and...

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The SS Bering

The story of the SS Bering begins with her launching under another name, the Annette Rolph, on July 4, 1918, in Fairhaven, California. The ship was a wood-hulled “tramp” freighter...

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Journey to the Yukon: Passage Aboard the Steamships from Puget Sound to the Far North

The month of July 1897 was an exciting time to be living on the West Coast. Steamships with names like Excelsior and Portland were docking in the ports of San...

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Profiles

Western Flyer: The Vessel of John Steinbeck

On the morning of Monday, March 11, 1940, writer John Steinbeck and marine biologist Ed Ricketts boarded the sardine seiner Western Flyer at a wharf in Monterey, California. Both men...

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Profiles

For the Love of Wooden Boats: Port Townsend's Shipwrights Co-Op

Southeast of Port Townsend is a gravel yard where large boats balance on blocks of wood and slender steel stands. Removed from the water, the vessels reveal pleasing, functional curves....

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SS Portland: The Ship that Started the Boom

August 16, 1896, stands out in the history of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska as the moment when miners prospecting along the Klondike River in the Yukon Territory discovered gold...

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The History and Meaning of Maritime Tattoos

Standing out among a variety of styles and techniques, aesthetics, and traditions, perhaps nothing is more recognizable in the tattooing world than the sailor tattoo. Steeped in maritime lore and...

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Soul of a Boat

Over the past four decades, Port Townsend, WA has become an important hub for the building and maintenance of wooden boats on the West Coast. It is there that the...

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Family At Sea

Morgan Lohrey has been sailing for as long as she can remember. Suppose it to say that a sailing life has not been an unlikely outcome given that her father...

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Washed Ashore in Port Townsend

Olivier Huin has spent his life amongst salt air and sawdust. A seafarer and wooden boat builder, he has travelled around the world by sailboat, often built by his own...

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Shipbuilding in the Pacific Northwest with Haven Boatworks

 There is a rich history of maritime pursuits in the foggy inlets and jagged shorelines of Washington State. From the hand-carved canoes of the Pacific Northwest’s original settlers to the...

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Aeolian: Sailing the Washington Coast with Jamie Swick

Jamie Swick, an outdoor and story-telling photographer specializing in film, calls Oregon home. A sailor, writer, and life-long woodswoman, her ethereal perspective on the natural world aims to capture quiet...

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