I’ve wanted to create this blog for years, a source of maritime heritage, sailor talk, skills, legends, superstitions, voyages, heroes (male and female), boats, and connections.

I’m the poor sod who writes and illustrates the four page “Skills 101” feature in each issue of WoodenBoat Magazine. Until last year it was an 8 page “Getting Started In Boats,” but I’m the comic book section of a serious magazine and four pages was deemed more seemly. You can learn what an odd duck I am by checking into my website, http://www.janadkins.wordpress.com, where you’ll find a list of my books, a few samples of illustration and text, and a scattering of awards (I was once among the literati).

In this blog, however, I’ll be confining myself to how important the water world has been to the history and the character of our battered nation. We are vastly blessed as a mighty country: we are a three-ocean nation – Atlantic, Pacific, and Caribbean – with a staggering riverine system reaching navigably from the east coast, far out past the Great Lakes, to the Rocky Mountains.

There are fewer rivers that reach inland from the Pacific because geologically newer mountains present steep ridges parallel to the coast. Certainly we count the Sacramento River above San Francisco Bay, and its near-mythical tributary, the American River, where gold was discovered in the flume of Sutter’s timber mill in 1848. The San Joaquin is the longest California river, a southern tributary to the Sacramento moving through fantastically rich growing land.

Lewis & Clark traveled west on the great Columbia River that debouches in Oregon at the infamous Columbia River Bar. Columbia navigation reaches inland via the Willamette River to Lewiston, Idaho.

The Colorado River is the sculptor of the Grand Canyon and the fifth largest river in the United States, but it moves through the arid southwest and is virtually used up by irrigation, dams, and evaporation by the time it crosses the Mexican border and joins the Gulf of California.

When we think of maritime adventures, we immediately picture blue water craft. For those of us from New England it’s inescapable. But our grander scope of maritime heritage embraces riverboats, barges, Great Lakes ore carriers, canoes, paddle wheel tugs, ferries, and dredgers inland. Those boats built as much of this nation as ships and brigs and schooners out of New England. From time to time this blog will be featuring some unfamiliar barkies.

Initially, and week by week, I hope to be discussing sailor’s language come ashore, how nautical expressions have enriched our office-bound conversations. I hope you’ll join me, comment often, disagree with me frequently, and recommend Dockwalloping as a pinch of marine spice to your day.