Soundings is the news and feature publication for recreational boaters. Award-winning coverage of the people, issues, events -- and the fun -- of recreational boating. Check out our generous boats-for-sale section and our gunkholing destinations.
A few months ago, I asked Soundings’ readers to share their thoughts about the people who taught them something special about boating. I continue to receive emails regularly and am grateful to those who have taken the time to tell their stories. Recently, I heard from P.D. Saracin of St. Helena, South Carolina, who says he got hooked on boats through the encouragement of his mother. “It was all her doing,” he says. He still remembers the day his family left the comfort of a table at Morrison’s Seafood Restaurant on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, to step out into a cold, blustery November afternoon. The bay was kicking up white caps and snowflakes were starting to drift down when Saracin’s mother spotted a 20-foot skiff across the parking lot…
In an effort to help preserve the oceans, Mexican-born photographer and conservationist Cristina Mittermeier spends a lot of time recording the beauty beneath the waves. A marine biologist by training, Mittermeier turned to photography when she realized that scientists were poor communicators and that people were more interested in photography than science. Her photography career started by accident when her now ex-husband inadvertently won an award for a photograph she’d taken. Realizing she might have a knack for photography, she switched careers. On a trip to French Polynesia, she recorded the interaction between Titouan Bernicot and a playful pink whiptail stingray in the warm shallows around Bernicot’s home island of Moorea, a photograph she titled “Alone Together.” Mittermeier was struck by how Bernicot, who was born on a pearl farm…
For Patrick Gallagher, back in the day, it was all about the Streblow. That was the wooden boat of choice on Lake Geneva, a playground for city-dwellers from Chicago. Today, he says, the lake is filled with Cobalts and Chris-Crafts, but back when Gallagher was a kid spending summers there with his family, he saw mostly Streblows. “It was the only flavor that people seemed to know,” he recalls. The nostalgia of those wooden boats helped to ease his mind after the Covid-19 pandemic descended in early 2020. Gallagher was thinking about how he was going to turn 50 years old, and about how, after 20 years as a co-owner in his family’s highway-paving business, he wanted to do something different. His wife, Rose, had spent 14 years as an…
Bob Chaulk lives about a half hour from the wreck of the SS Atlantic in Nova Scotia. He often heads out there in a 17-footer that he built himself; it’s what he calls a very modest nod to the grand tradition of his schooner-building ancestors. For the better part of 30 years, he’s been donning a dry suit and descending into the frigid waters off Halifax to dive the site of what, in her day, was the world’s worst transatlantic passenger ship disaster. Chaulk has been searching for clues underwater—and in documents on land, and in conversations with the survivors’ great-great-grandchildren—trying to answer nagging questions about the Atlantic’s demise. It was a wreck that made the newspapers far beyond Canada when it happened on April 1, 1873, what with the…
In the old days, mariners navigated by looking at a paper chart and a compass. Today, electronic plotters and GPS equipment have just about killed paper charts. But if the electronics fail, many skippers will resort to red, right, return. Keeping the red buoys to starboard when returning to port might get you to your destination, unless of course you skip one, which could lead to a costly mistake. Stopping by the boatyard one afternoon, I chatted with a boat owner standing by his inboard cruiser in the Travelift and noticed a pair of bent wheels hanging from the propeller shafts. Somewhere in his travels he had found some underwater real estate that mangled the props, and he couldn’t fathom how it had happened. He swore he’d kept the red…
BOUNTY OF THE SEA Seafood is much like many of the other perishable items we pick up at a supermarket or specialty foods store—most of it is so easy to find year-round that we take it for granted and put little thought into where it came from or how it was harvested and processed. These three titles colorfully describe the people, culture and heritage behind some of the best-known American seafood fisheries. BEAUTIFUL SWIMMERS Callinectes sapidus is the scientific name for the blue crab, an armored crustacean with weaponized claws and a grumpy disposition. The name translates loosely from Greek and Latin to “beautiful savory swimmer.” Though blue crabs can be found all along the East and Gulf coasts, Chesapeake Bay is often touted as having the most robust blue crab fishery…
