Feature: Keeping the Port in Portland
We rolled into town on the last train north, arriving Portland, Maine at 2:00 a.m. Half an hour later we were at the dock, hauling our kit - and when Marine News travels light, we're like Hannibal crossing the Alps - over silent tugs resting abreast: Captain Bill, Justine McAllister, Stamford. On the phone a few days before, Capt. Brian Fournier had said something about leaving a light in Stamford's forward port cabin, and there, finally, it shone. But something brighter had caught our eye, and could we believe it? Last time we saw something like it, it was in Aberdeen, Scotland. Now, from Stamford's starboard rail, it loomed and glistened four hundred feet away - rising nearly as high - a pair of deep-sea drilling platforms, afloat waters barely up to their ankles.
On Tugboats
There have been plenty of books published on the subject of tugboats in the past few years, sharing a cookie-cutter similarity - they're large, handsome, colorful, well-produced coffee-table volumes, which pretty much cover the same introductory material in the same glancing way. In all those regards and quite a few more, Virginia Thorndike's On Tugboats is a different sort of book. For starters, it's not large nor particularly handsome, and not all that well-produced - a standard paperback printed in black-and-white on paper that will probably not last for centuries. But then, it is a book crying out to be read, where coffee-table books ask merely to be seen.
