The features take the journal's longest words. The departments take the journal's most useful ones — the recurring small problems, the procedural notes, the diagram we keep wanting to print but never quite have the space for. Every Tuesday morning at the shop, after the Wednesday haul-out slot has been confirmed and before the morning meeting, the editor and the apprentice spend forty minutes on the departments. The Daybook gets the previous week's entries. The Tankage Notes get any spec that has come up twice in the previous month. The Shop Drawings get any plate the editor has been redrawing in his notebook for more than two weeks. The Letters get anything that has arrived in the mail (or, increasingly, via the editor's email).

Subscribers tell us the departments are the section they look forward to most. The features are read once and re-read at the start of a refit; the departments are read every issue and kept on the boat as ongoing reference. The reference primers (which are linked off the Reference Library) are the section the reader hands to a friend; the departments are the section the reader keeps for themselves.

The four departments are stable across issues. The content varies; the structure does not. This is on purpose: a reader who has read three issues knows where to find the Daybook, where to look for the Letters, what to expect in the Shop Drawings. The journal is a publication; it should behave like one.