The trade is the document.

The first issue of this quarterly went out in the long winter of 2021, on the third snow day of January, when the yard was closed and the cold snap had us standing inside watching a frozen freshwater feed-line on a 1958 Owens cruiser slowly thaw onto the floor under shop heaters. The boat's owner had paid for an emergency haul-out the previous afternoon, on a hunch, after his bilge alarm had failed twice in a week. He was right: under the panel were two feet of antifreezed-over copper, a brass street ell that had been weeping since the previous owner had handed her over in 1998, and a Y-valve so old that the manufacturer had been out of business for a decade. The whole thing had survived two seasons of Salish Sea winters more or less by luck.

I had been a working plumber for twenty-one years at that point — fifteen in residential, six in marine — and I had no working notion of where the first place a small-boat plumber should learn from a long-dead trade was, on a day when the building inspector had gone home and the only person in the yard was the Travelift operator drinking coffee on the office porch. I had Nigel Calder's Boatowner's Mechanical and Electrical Manual, four editions of Casey's Sailboat Maintenance Manual, and a stack of WoodenBoat back issues from 1986 to the present. None of those quite addressed why a perfectly good copper line laid by a tradesman in 1958 had failed in 2020, or — more importantly — what we should do about it for the boats that would still be in the water in 2050.

So I started writing the answer down. The early issues were typed at home, in the small front room of our house on Cape George, on a 1987 Brother typewriter that I have since retired. The first run was forty copies, mailed to other marine trades on the peninsula. By the third issue, two of the Bristol Bay gillnet captains were paying for subscriptions to put on board. By the seventh issue, we had committed to the present press run — eight hundred copies, six issues a year — through a small typographic press in Tacoma whose proprietor is the spouse of a customer.

What the journal is for

The journal exists for one purpose: to record the working theory of small-boat plumbing as it is practiced in the Salish Sea at the start of the 2020s, in enough detail that the next generation of trades — including the apprentices who pass through this shop on their way out into the world — can argue with us about it. Every refit gets a feature. Every department records the recurring small problems we forget about over the slow season. Every reference page is written, deliberately, in a way that allows another shop to disagree with us about how the work was specified.

We do not advertise. We make a small loss on the journal every year, made up by the shop's refit revenue, and we accept that arrangement because the journal is the only document we ourselves trust at the start of a difficult refit. It is also the document we hand to a new apprentice on day one. We use it to teach the trade.

What it is not

It is not a marketing instrument. It is not a brochure. It does not promise anyone that we will take on their boat. We turn down a great deal of work that comes to us through the Classifieds desk: anything that requires a hot-work permit in a slip we cannot ventilate, anything that involves a vessel we believe is unsafe to keep in the water (a determination we make in consultation with a NAMS or SAMS surveyor we trust), and any project where the owner is not, at minimum, willing to read the relevant Reference primer before we begin.

It is also not WoodenBoat, which is the bimonthly of record for our part of the trade and has been since 1974,¹ nor is it the Maritime Reporter and Engineering News, which is the trade journal of the larger end of the industry, in print continuously since 1939.² Both are excellent and we cite both regularly. Both are written for an audience an order of magnitude larger than ours. What this journal does is sit in the gap that opens between the manufacturer-issued application note and the cruising-magazine field test — the gap where the actual installation happens, at 47°F, on the night before the yard closes for the weekend.

Who we are

We are six. Marcus Greve, Editor and Master Plumber (Washington State Plumbing Contractor PLUMARI*937BX, ABYC-certified, 22 years marine). Salla Andresen, Tankage & MSDs (14 years, formerly a fabricator at the Holmqvist tank shop in Tacoma, ASSE 5110 cross-connection certified). Bram Halvorsen, Watermakers & Pressure Systems (Spectra-factory-trained 2017, 9 years on the bench). Lucia Brae, Apprentice and Daybook contributor (3rd-period plumbing apprentice, NW School of Wooden Boatbuilding 2022, photographer of this journal). Jens Holmqvist, Drydock Foreman (30 years, retired Sea-Land, the shop's safety officer). Tilly Hadlock, Classifieds and Subscriptions (manages everything that involves a calendar).

The Masthead below records who is responsible for what in this particular issue.

What to read next

If you are new to the journal, the place to start is the Features index for this issue. The five long-form refit features account for most of what we know about how we work; they are written in the voice of the tradesperson who led each refit, with the editor's hand kept deliberately light. After that, the Reference Library — four primers on MSDs, watermakers, tankage, and bilge management — is the place we send most customers who want to know what they are getting into before they call us. The Daybook, finally, is the most-read section in our small subscriber base: four short entries from the shop calendar, written in the present tense, week by week.

— Marcus Greve, Editor. Issue dated 19 May 2026.