I grew up around boats.
Long before I worked in publishing, carried a camera for newspapers, wrote books, or spent years helping travelers navigate unfamiliar places, I was the kid aboard my family's boat who took the job of First Mate far too seriously.
My father gave me the title when I was young. I treated it like a commission.
I learned to read weather before I could explain it. I learned that local knowledge mattered. I learned that the captain who asked questions at the dock usually had a better day than the one who assumed he already knew the answers.
Those lessons stayed with me. Boats became a constant thread through my life. Travel became the profession.
I spent years as a photojournalist, photographer, author, and travel publishing executive helping people understand places they had never seen before. Eventually I realized the waterways that had shaped my own life suffered from the same problem I had seen throughout travel: the information existed, but it was scattered.
The weather was in one place.
The notices were somewhere else.
The local knowledge lived in conversations.
The best lessons were often buried in experience.
Then my parents completed the Great Loop. Watching them move through thousands of miles of connected waterways made something obvious. The route is one of the most remarkable journeys in North America, yet much of the information surrounding it still lives in PDFs, forums, screenshots, marina bulletin boards, and notebooks passed from one captain to another.
I kept wishing the publication already existed. Eventually I stopped looking for it and started building it.
That's how ICW News began.
Not as a technology project.
Not as a startup.
As a publishing project built around a waterway I plan to spend the second half of my life exploring, photographing, writing about, and traveling repeatedly.
The title "Harbormaster" is partly tongue-in-cheek. I don't run a harbor. I don't issue orders. I don't know everything.
But I do believe in keeping watch.
I believe in good information.
I believe in official sources.
I believe in local knowledge.
And I believe the best captains never stop learning.
That's the spirit behind ICW News.