Soundings Editors

Upper Chesapeake Bay boaters are for the second time this year playing dodge ball with trees, logs, tires and other debris sent downstream from the 90-year-old Conowingo Dam.

Scientists have been trying to figure out why California’s great white sharks take a month every year to travel to an empty spot in the Pacific Ocean that’s halfway toHawaii. A recent research expedition revealed that there might be a lot on the menu there for the sharks to eat. READ MORE

After five years of planning and testing, the nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup has deployed its first collection boom to remove plastic from the Pacific Ocean.

Though Hurricane Florence did not come ashore at predicted Category 4 strength, the storm cast a wide swath of flooding and destruction in North Carolina.

If Hurricane Florence damaged your vessel, be sure to read these tips before you even touch your boat.

When hurricanes approach, boat owners immediately think about the security of their vessels, but what about the EPIRBs they keep onboard? READ MORE

Early reports from the Carolinas indicate that Hurricane Florence is already having a “freaky” effect on tidal conditions. READ MORE.

As Hurricane Florence barrels toward the Eastern Seaboard, boaters are faced with a variety of choices based on the storm’s path. Here are a number of sources to guide those decisions. READ MORE

Electric-powered, donut-shaped rental boats with names such as Glazed And Confusedand Sprinklesthis month hit the Lake Union waterfront in Seattle, Washington. The boats have long been popular in Europe but are new in the United States.

Political and economic crises are causing a massive uptick in pirate activity from Venezuela to Nicaragua and Haiti.

Anyone who’s been around wooden boat building knows about using oakum or cotton to seal the spaces between wood planks. But cow hair? You just have to see it to believe it

Watch a behemoth white shark breach underneath a harpooning platform while a research technician from the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy tries to tag it. The breach was so close that it caused the technician to nearly leap out of his sea boots.

In this Ask Mario video, Mario Vittone answers Len Thibodeaux's question: Does Mario prefer EPIRBs or Satellite Tracking Devices?

Just like a scene out of the hit movie The Italian Job, bandits in Stockholm, Sweden, recently made off in a motorboat after a heist of epic proportions. They carried with them two priceless 17th-century royal crowns and an orb.

Boating and ice cream. Could there be a more perfect marriage? On Little Sebago Lake in Maine, one young entrepreneur has continued a tradition of selling ice cream from a pontoon boat to raise dollars for his college education. READ MORE

Sharks are good! Just remember that. And if you don’t believe it, you’ll want to read this article about some of the many benefits sharks provide to keep our ocean ecosystems in balance. READ MORE.

A tour boat navigating around a coastal lava flow in Hawaii this week was struck by a large chunk of lava, injuring 23 people. The basketball-size rock punctured the boat’s roof and covered its deck with volcanic debris

Now in its fifth year, the Solar & Energy Boat Challenge is hosted by the Yacht Club de Monaco to stimulate the use of renewable and clean energy technologies in boats. Watch as a fleet of high-tech electric boats take to the Mediterranean Sea to battle it out.

Divers working 70 miles off Cape May, New Jersey, last week discovered the wreckage of the Octavian, a Norwegian freighter that went missing in 1942.

The 115-foot Viking longship Draken Harald Harfage, a replica of the sailing and rowing craft used by Vikings more than 1,000 years ago, set sail this week for Boothbay Harbor, Maine, from the Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut

A fleet of nine windjammers got underway from Islesboro, Maine, on July 6 for the 42ndinstallment of the Great Schooner Race, one of the largest gatherings of traditional schooners in the United States. Soundings enjoyed racing action aboard the 95-foot Schooner Heritage, which took first place overall.

Made from at least 80,000 images tied together into 1.5 terabytes of video footage, this 30-day time-lapse follows the journey of a containership from the Red Sea to Hong Kong, China. Watch from the bridge as the ship steams through storms, glides beneath a star-filled sky and ties up at ports along the way.

Crab cakes, crab imperial and crab dip are just a few of the blue crab specialties you’ll find at seafood restaurants and on home menus around the Chesapeake Bay region. Those tasty dishes may be challenging to find this year — or cost you more money — because of a shortage of immigrant workers.

Launched on April 28 this year, Russia’s 474-foot long Akademik Lomonosovis the world’s first floating nuclear power plant. Capable of producing 70 megawatts of power, the ship is currently making its way across the Arctic Ocean to Eastern Russia.

Robert Allan Ltd. of Vancouver, British Columbia, has released the design for a 52-foot, all-electric, aluminum pilot boat with a top speed of 20 knots and a range of 5 nautical miles. The boat is powered by twin 720-volt, 500-kW electric motors.

The Coast Guard on Monday deployed the Francis Scott Key memorial buoy in the Patapsco River off Baltimore, Maryland. The red-white-and-blue buoy marks the approximate position where Key wrote “Defence of Fort McHenry,” while imprisoned aboard a British ship. Key’s poem would go on to become the national anthem of the United States.

Hawaii’s erupting Kilauea volcano has destroyed more than 600 homes and smothered hundreds of acres of land in lava since early May. But what happens to marine life when that lava enters the sea?

If you’ve ever examined the complex, curvy shapes of the planks that make up a wooden boat’s hull, you might have wondered, “How do they get straight pieces of wood to bend that way?” Steam is part of the answer, brute force is the other.

Yamaha Marine last week took the wraps off its 5.6-liter XTO Offshore platform by introducing its biggest outboard offering to date, a 425-hp, four-stroke outboard called the XF425. Designed from the propeller up for big offshore boats, the XF425 boasts a number of innovations and industry firsts.

Plenty of folks who are familiar with celestial navigation know what a sextant is, but have you ever heard of an octant? In this video, chief curator Pete Lesher of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St, Michaels, Maryland, talks about 18th- and 19th-century navigational instruments and the stories of the people who owned them.

The effects of climate change impact not only human beings on land but also animals that swim in our oceans. Warming ocean waters are causing everything from lobsters and crabs to striped bass and bluefin tuna to expand their ranges, sometimes putting them out of reach of the fishermen who depend on the species for a living.

The engaged couple set out to cross an ocean unaware that they’d eventually sail right into one of the most catastrophic hurricanes in recorded history. Now their story is headed for the big screen.

Researchers believe as much as 12.7 million tons of plastic waste is dumped into our oceans each year and that 95 percent of it comes from only 10 rivers, eight of which are in Asia. Find out more about these rivers and what is being done to clean them up by reading here.

Leg 8 of the 2017-2018 Volvo Ocean Race got underway off Itajaí, Brazil, yesterday bound for Newport, Rhode Island. The 5,700-nautical-mile-long run takes sailors around the eastern end of Brazil, through the doldrums and across the Equator and then through the western Atlantic Ocean to Newport.

The Florida Fish And Wildlife Conservation Commission is considering opening a limited season via a lottery drawing that would allow 100 fisherman to harvest one goliath grouper per year.

The 2018 Maryland Legislature adjourned yesterday and among the last-minute bills that passed was a resolution to fund the Pride of Baltimore II, the globe-trotting sailing ambassador for Baltimore City and the state of Maryland, to the tune of $500,000 annually. Despite the funding, the tall ship is still facing a yearly $700,000 budget shortfall.

These 10 world adventurers cast off their lines and headed toward the locations of their dreams. You can, too. Read here the uncut answers to the questions we asked these globe-trotting cruisers, who have more than 100,000 cruising miles under their belts.

British sailor John Fisher, a crew member onboard Volvo Ocean Race Team Sun Hung Kai/Scallywag, is presumed lost at sea after being washed overboard March 26 some 1,400 miles west of Cape Horn, Chile. Scallywag was sailing downwind in near-gale conditions when Fisher went over.

Despite the extensive damage inflicted on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten by Hurricane Irma last year, things are getting back to normal. There is perhaps no better sign of the recovery than the successful racing earlier this month of the 38th St. Maarten Heineken Regatta, which drew in close to 4,000 people.

Launched on Oct. 5, 1889 at Tilghman Island, Maryland, the bugeye Edna E. Lockwood is undergoing a complete restoration at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, Maryland. Among the work completed to date was the total removal and replacement of her nine-log bottom. This video has an update about the wrap-up work being done before Edna is relaunched later this year.

Luke Powell is leading a team of boatbuilders who are crafting a recreation of a 68-foot Falmouth Pilot Cutter named Vincent, which was originally launched in 1852. The goal of the project is to train up aspiring young shipwrights in the traditional methods required to build these graceful wooden sailboats.

When it comes to comfort and seakeeping, larger powerboats are hard to beat. Whether you’re a power cat fan, a hard-core sport fisherman or a trawler lover — or maybe you’re somewhere in between — one of these 10 powerboats over 44 feet should tickle your fancy.

Working Sail is a British organization that is working to keep the art and craftsmanship of traditional wooden boatbuilding alive. Their latest project is Pellew, a recreation of a 68-foot Falmouth Pilot Cutter named Vincent, which was launched in 1852. This video shows some of the methods and materials being used to build her.

A single oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day, making the bivalve a critical puzzle piece in the effort to clean up Chesapeake Bay. Twenty groups, ranging from oyster farmers to research organizations, plan to boost the Chesapeake Bay’s oyster population to 10 billion by 2025, improving the Bay’s water quality in the process.

Whether it’s a light switch, the polyester fiber in your comforter or the packaging your fast-food came in, plastic is virtually impossible to avoid in the modern world. And millions of tons of it ends up in our oceans each year. This video from Vice News has more on the crisis and what is being done to combat the problem.

A popular target among anglers, the swordfish is a solitary billfish that can be found as deep as 1,800 feet below the surface. Equipped with huge, softball-size eyes that allow it to see in the darkness of the abyss, swordfish use their broad, sword-like bills to slash and stun prey. This NOAA video shows a swordfish at 1,739 feet doing just that.

The Mayflower II, a 1957 reproduction of the original ship that brought Pilgrims to the New World nearly 400 years ago, is undergoing a complete refit at the Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut. Among the upgrades she is receiving are all-new stays for her three masts. This video from the museum shows how a rigger fabricates a mouse — an elaborate work of marlinspike seamanship — for each stay.

In the golden age of sail, a ship’s sails were attached to the masts with wooden hoops. Today only a few artisans have the tools and know-how to craft sailing tackle for traditionally rigged ships and other vessels. Ralph Johnson is one of them.