Articles

Interesting weather

Winter, at least in the Northeast, is a time where weather ascends to the topmost levels of our consciousness. It determines what we do, where we go and whether we can accomplish certain things at all. This year in Maine we’ve already had an ice storm that knocked out electricity for thousands, and snowstorms that

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Venturing

Dancing on the sound For 20 years, Mark Hooper has tended crab pots on Core Sound, northeast of Beaufort, North Carolina. Bounded by forested lowlands to the west and south, and the distant Outer Banks just visible five miles away, Core Sound is shallow and can be windy, but by the standards of Capes Fear

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Venturing

Sailing through Gotha A photograph on the wall of Wesley Rodstrom Jr.’s office at Consolidated Yachts on City Island in the Bronx, New York City, speaks volumes about this storied place: one of the two men in the picture is Sir Thomas Lipton, the British tea merchant who tried five times to win the America’s

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Managing ourselves into oblivion

Sharing the Ocean: Stories of Science, Politics and Ownership from America’s Oldest Industry By Michael Crocker Tilbury House, 2008 Softcover, 160 pages, $20   “An Enormous, Immensely Complicated Intervention” Groundfish, the New England Fishery Management Council, and the World Fisheries Crisis By Spencer Apollonio and Jacob J. Dykstra E Book Time LLC, Montgomery, Alabama, 2008

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Venturing

About a year and a half ago, when I’d just become eligible for Social Security, I realized it was time to undertake one of those Big Things we all think about but usually don’t do. In my case, I’d recently come into possession of a wonderful sailboat, thanks to an insurance settlement following the wreck

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Venturing

In Maine, I’m afraid, it’s too easy to forget that working waterfronts exist all over the world, in all sorts of places that don’t have lobsters, big tides or even salt water. Take Duluth, Minnesota, at the western end of Lake Superior. Duluth got its start as a port in the 1850s (a false start,

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Fire destroys Midcoast shipyard

Two partially completed tugboats and a pile of scrap metal were all that remained after a fierce fire destroyed the Washburn & Doughty shipyard in E. Boothbay on July 11. The company, which employed approximately 100 workers before the fire, laid off 65 of them and kept 35 working on a third tug that had

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Harpoon: Into the Heart of Whaling

Heart of Darkness Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2008300 pp, $25.00 Fin, Right, Blue, Sperm, Minke, Humpback: one by one, chapter by chapter in this remarkable book, each species of whale reaches commercial or outright extinction, all the while “managed” by governments and the International Whaling Commission. Over the years there has been no lack of

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Venturing

Readers of the New York Times will be aware of this summer’s non-news event: the construction of a Whiffleball field in Greenwich, Connecticut, by a group of teenage boys who cleared brush, braved poison ivy, scrounged a few building materials and bought some paint so they could build their field of dreams on some town-owned

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