Editor in chief
Niamh O'Halloran grew up in a Dingle Peninsula fishing family and has written about coastal communities for two decades. She founded Sea Marker in 2025.
Beats
Coastal Towns
Two weeks before the North Marine Road ground hosts its first Yorkshire fixture of the year, the North Yorkshire seaside town finishes the long preparation that its summer trade depends on.
Fisheries
Nephrops norvegicus — Norway lobster, scampi, langoustine, prawn, depending on who is buying — is the most valuable shellfish landed in the United Kingdom. The Eyemouth fleet has fished it for decades. The 2026 season has begun under unusual conditions.
Shipping
On the Delaware River, where the Jones Act fleet has shrunk to fewer than ninety hulls, the crew of the Overseas Boston works a trade that nobody is replacing.
Tides
On the wall above the kettle in Port Rexton, a small printed booklet has hung on the same nail for forty-one years.
Knots & Lines
Niamh O'Halloran walks a Galway marina in late spring and counts forty-three fenders hanging from boats. Twelve of them are tied to fail.
Coastal Towns
When the Marine Hotel's public bar shut for six weeks of overdue plumbing work, the small Aberdeenshire harbour town adjusted in ways that surprised everyone except the regulars.
Charts
A 123-year-old chart, found in a deceased mariner's estate in Stornoway, became the starting point for a year of cross-checking what had changed in the Outer Hebridean shoreline since the survey of HMS Research in 1898.
Weather
The British Shipping Forecast is the most celebrated weather product in the English language. A skipper on the Solway Firth reads it the way other people read poetry, and acts on it the way they cannot.
Coastal Towns
The East Neuk village holds the line through a cold month with the fish bar still open at noon, the lifeboat shed warm, and the harbour quietly counting down to the start of the creel season.
Fisheries
The pier at Kilronan looks much the same as it did in 1995, except that there are now six boats tied up where there were twenty-two. The men who fish them are mostly between fifty and seventy. The fish, which are mostly pollack and ling, are coming up at depths the boats used not to bother with.
Lighthouses
The horn sounds for four seconds, falls silent for fifty-six, and has done so without interruption since the second week of April. It is now May.
Charts
In a second-floor office above a hardware store in Camden, Hollis Burnham has been drawing inshore charts by hand and by Illustrator since 1991. He is, he believes, the last person in the state still doing it as a trade.
Knots & Lines
Niamh O'Halloran sits in a Dingle workshop at a bench her uncle built in 1981 and works a Brummel splice into a five-millimetre Dyneema line. It takes her twenty-two minutes.
Weather
A volunteer weather observer at Pemaquid Point logged 218 fog hours in 2025. Her notebook reveals patterns the official station misses entirely.
Fisheries
Bornstein Seafoods runs a small can line three days a week in a low building on Pier 39. The pack is modest, the labels are several, and the work is mostly done by women in their fifties who used to work the salmon cannery next door.
Lighthouses
Patrick Myrick keeps a fixed white light, a clockwork rotation, and a record book in a hand his father taught him at the kitchen table in Drook in 1971.
Coastal Towns
Eighteen months after the closing of the Stinson cannery in Prospect Harbor and three decades after Lubec lost its own, the easternmost town in the United States is still learning what comes after fish.
Tides
The moon's orbit tilts and re-tilts on a slow clock, and the tides keep score. A look at the nodal cycle from the harbour wall at Dingle.