The Most Recent Ship Report Podcast:

A look at the bows of ships: the very important front end of things

Today, a look at a very specific and important design feature on ships: the bow, the very front end of things. Why do they look the way they do? And why do some ships look different than others? Image: a ship with a plumb bow in the Astoria Anchorage. Credit: Joanne Rideout 2025.

Archive Podcasts:

The MSC Katie: the latest, biggest containership ever to transit the river

Apr 05, 2023

Today, a new recordholder on the river: the MSC Katie now becomes the largest containership every to transit the Columbia.

We’ll talk about what criteria make a ship biggest, how containerships are tending to get larger all the time, and how the Katie compares to other  large containerhips we’ve seen recently on the river.

Terrible Tilly gets new life

Apr 03, 2023

Today we take a look at Terrible Tilly, the former site of a lighthouse on a rock in the Pacific Ocean off Ecola State Park. The old lighthouse site is getting new life as the current owner attempts to refurbish the weather-beaten structure. The rock has been taken over for years by sea lions, seals and sea birds, and is still just about as hard to get to as she always was. We’ll talk about how Tilly came to be, a bit about her history, and what her future might hold.

Some poetry to start your weekend, and more ship details

Mar 31, 2023

Today we take a closer look at a couple of arriving ships, and we’ll also hear a poem written by Irish poet David Whyte, who lives in the Pacific Northwest.

The poem is titled, “Light Over Water,” and it’s about what I like to call the “beautiful ordinary,” those lovely things that happen right under our noses, things we often miss.

Cruise ship heads to Portland drydock

Mar 27, 2023

Today we’ll see a cruise ship in the river, but she’s not carrying passengers. This time this ship is headed for the shipyard. We’ll talk about what shipyards do, and why Portland’s Swan Island yard is specially equipped to handle big ships like this one.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

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