Touring the Horizon Consumer and grooming my son for a maritime academy.
Just this afternoon, a deck officer friend of mine offered my son and I a tour of the Horizon Consumer, tied up at a lay berth in Bellingham, Wash. The Consumer is a 720-ft Jones Act steam ship, built in 1973. Today she was completely empy, but tomorrow she'll be breaking out and heading for Tacoma, Wash. where she'll load containers bound for Alaska. This tour put merchant mariner up there with archeologist and film maker in my son's growing list of "things I'm going to be when I grow up."