Shipping
The Baltic Feeder Trade in Winter
Between Hamburg and the Gulf of Finland, the small feeder ships work an ice-laden trade that the big container lines depend on and the maritime press rarely covers.
Charts & weather editor
Per Lindgren
Per Lindgren is a retired Swedish naval hydrographer who now writes about charts, weather, and the working seas of northern Europe.
Beats
Published in Sea Marker
Knots & Lines
The Rolling Hitch and the Art of Friction
Per Lindgren teaches the rolling hitch to a class of four amateur sailors in Karlskrona and watches three of them fail it in the same way.
Tides
Reading a Tide Rip on Penobscot Bay
Standing waves, eddy lines, and the difference between a fair tide and a foul one. A morning aboard a 32-foot sloop out of Camden.
Charts
Chart Datums, Low Water, and What Your Sounding Actually Means
A sounding of 6 feet on the chart does not mean 6 feet of water. It means 6 feet of water at a specific theoretical low. In the Bay of Fundy in June, that distinction is worth a keel.
Lighthouses
A Week at Cordouan: The King of Lighthouses
The tender out of Le Verdon-sur-Mer leaves at low water, an hour and twenty minutes before the lighthouse is accessible on foot across the sandbank.
Weather
Reading Isobars as a Skipper's Craft
A weather facsimile machine still hangs on the bulkhead at the Halifax sailing school where Esther Beaulieu teaches small-boat weather. She thinks every coastal skipper should read a synoptic chart, even when the apps work.
Charts
Scale, Generalization, and the Lies a Chart Must Tell
Every chart smooths the coastline. A close look at three NOAA charts of the same Massachusetts shore, at scales of 1:80,000, 1:40,000, and 1:20,000, shows what each one chooses to leave out, and why.
Shipping
The Pilot Station at the Bosphorus
On a strait that handles forty-three thousand vessels a year, the Turkish pilots board in any weather and steer ships that often do not speak their language.
Lighthouses
Decommissioning a 1907 Scottish Lighthouse
The Northern Lighthouse Board's decommissioning crew arrived at the small light at Eilean Glas on a Tuesday morning in late April, on the 09:40 ferry from Tarbert.
Charts
The Hand-Bearing Compass at Sea, Taught Well
Astrid Pereira's brother is an offshore yacht delivery skipper. Over four days off the south coast of Brittany in May, he taught a class of six how to use a hand-bearing compass as if the plotter had quit. None of it was new. All of it had been forgotten.
Tides
The Spring Tide at Mont-Saint-Michel
Twice a year, the abbey on the Norman coast becomes an island again. A field visit during the April equinox tide.
Weather
Marine Forecast Vocabulary, Decoded
The NOAA marine forecast is a closed dialect. A retired Coast Guard meteorologist in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, walks through what the words actually mean for a 26-foot boat on a Friday afternoon.
Charts
NOAA Paper Charts and C-MAP, Compared in the Same Cockpit
A four-month inshore test off Boothbay, with a paper folio on the chart table and a Raymarine plotter at the helm, found neither obsolete and neither sufficient on its own.
Knots & Lines
The Bowline as a Household Tool
Per Lindgren keeps a length of nine-millimetre polyester in the drawer beside the bread knife. The knot he ties most often is not at sea.