Shipping editor
Reidar Vik served twelve years on Norwegian cargo and ferry vessels before he came ashore to write about them.
Beats
Charts
The NOAA Coast Pilot is not a chart. It is a book, currently in 9 volumes, last fully revised between 2023 and 2025. For everything a chart cannot tell you, it is still the first thing to read.
Lighthouses
The U.S. Coast Guard's Aids to Navigation Team at Astoria, Oregon, services fog signals at twenty-three lights along a stretch of coast that is foggy more days than not.
Shipping
Three years after the Ever Given, the Suez Canal Authority has rebuilt its pilotage system, expanded the southern bypass, and added a layer of caution that the masters notice in the slowness.
Fisheries
The Bristol Bay sockeye salmon fishery is the largest wild salmon run on Earth. The economy that surrounds it — permits, processors, set-net sites, charter pilots, tender captains — runs on a fragile combination of biology, price, and timing. The 2026 forecast is, by Bristol Bay standards, modest.
Knots & Lines
Reidar Vik examines the anchor system on a thirty-two-foot Hallberg-Rassy in a Norwegian fjord and finds, as he often does, that the snubber is the part most neglected.
Fisheries
Iceland has run a transferable individual quota system for its cod fishery since 1991. The system has rebuilt the stock, consolidated the fleet, and made a handful of families wealthy. In Vestmannaeyjar, the largest of the Westman Islands, the consequences are visible from any dock.
Charts
A skipper sees a new buoy on his C-MAP plotter and assumes the chart company sent someone to look at it. The actual pipeline runs through USCG notices, Notices to Mariners, IHO S-100 feeds, and a small office in Genoa.
Shipping
At anchor in the bay of Algeciras, the fuel barges work day and night to refuel ships that never enter port — and the Rock watches a trade worth roughly six million tonnes a year.
Weather
Line squalls kill more weekend sailors in the Chesapeake than any other weather phenomenon. A Hampton Roads sailmaker explains what to do in the eight minutes between seeing one and being inside it.
Shipping
An Atlantic crossing on the Maersk Sembawang, from Algeciras to Newark, where the work is steady, the meals are punctual, and the bridge is mostly quiet.
Knots & Lines
Reidar Vik walks the length of a chandler's shop on Strandkaien in Bergen and counts seventeen distinct rope types on the shelves. Most boaters, he says, need three.
Shipping
Twelve hours on the apron at NIT, where the cranes work to a script written in Singapore and the longshoremen read the wind off the Chesapeake.