Water ballet

I'm waiting for the ferry at the Seattle-Bainbridge terminal right now and watching an intricate ballet unfold off the Seattle waterfront. An OSCO container ship is coming in to the east waterway, with tugs in attendance, as the Kaleetan sits at Coleman dock offloading and Wenatchee manuevers around to the north to come in to the dock to unload as well. In the background, the Adventuress beats southward nearer Bainbridge Island and a Coast Guard cutter heads north. The winds are out of the south at ten to fifteen knots. I shudder to think what sort of windage the ferries and cargo ships present; on the other hand, their vast bulk must also have an intrinsically damping effect on any such motion.

You don't have to be on the water regularly, or at all, to appreciate these things; but I find I notice them more now.

I see there is another ferry in the dry dock over at Todd Shipyards on Harbor Island. Looks like one of the super-Jumbos, but I hadn't heard that any of them were being taken out of service. I wonder too if the cutter is heading out for a reason; on the way over earlier today, I saw a smaller fast-response boat with its lights on heading the same direction. A single large incident happening? Or completely unrelated? Nautical matters are under-reported, or if they are not, I at least haven't found a good real-time or near-real-time source of them yet. I have come to realize that I've been spoiled by the past few years in West Seattle with the West Seattle Blog to refer to as the the information source of first resort in almost every instance. With more of our time spent in Ballard now, we've taken to checking out MyBallard.com, which is often mentioned in the same breath with WSB, Fremont Universe, and CHS as frontrunners of the new hyper-local news scene. But MyBallard is a pale, feeble imitation of WSB... updates are old, infrequent, and incomplete. Mandy read something the other day which was comparing the post volume of the various local hyper-local (did I coin that?) websites, and WSB was far and away the most prolific.

It certainly shows in the quality and utility of the site. Do you hear sirens in West Seattle? Check WSB... they already know what's going on. Traffic backed up? Check WSB, they know why, and what your best alternate routes are. Looking for something to do this weekend? WSB has all the events, no matter how small, happening in the neighborhood, and hey, if you missed one, they usually have reports afterward of what happened and how it was. One day, Mandy heard a strange beeping noise outside in our neighborhood. It was irregular but kept coming back. Finally, we checked WSB. Turns out someone had gone out of town and their house alarm had malfunctioned several blocks north of us. WSB had the story, had followed up with the police, and checked with the alarm company to see what the timeline might be for getting the thing fixed, all before we even thought to check the site.

This sort of in-depth, up-to-the-minute information beats anything that traditional news sources can provide, even those with websites, and the success that WSB has had in delivering such information feeds on itself. At least half of the secret to their success is that almost everyone in West Seattle, should anything even remotely newsworthy occur in their presence, will quickly tip them via e-mail, cell-phone, or Twitter. They've effectively tapped into the local population, because those people all know that what they contribute will be reported and be useful to their neighbors. And because everyone checks the site when things are actually in progress, you get a wider variety of information sources than if a whole army of reporters had been sent to cover the event. The comments are often as useful as the story, and the editors frequently make use of information gathered there as well.

The other half of the secret seems to be that they are dedicated, old-school reporters... up half the night listening to the scanner, in the car in an instant to check out a scoop, cell phone always on. Fast footwork and good sources make for great reporting. And of course none if it would work if Tracy and Patrick weren't extremely professional in tone and conduct. They have journalism backgrounds, and it shows; but unlike their more staid compatriots in the "real" newsrooms, they also have figured out how to leverage modern technology to get useful information to people in a short timeframe.

In the summer, Captain Richard Rodriguez's Bitter End fills much of this gap for the San Juan Islands, although that isn't his goal and consequently there are many gaps in the coverage. Puget Sound Maritime fills a position as an aggregator of nautical news published elsewhere, but it's neither timely nor complete. Three Sheets Northwest has excellent, well-researched and well-written feature articles, but it's geared almost entirely in that direction and lacks immediacy and completeness as a nautical news source. The Coast Guard's District 13 public information site is an excellent resource for Coast Guard activities, but generally well after the fact (and rightly so; they have more pressing business).

In short, I am probably asking for too much... spoiled, as I said. I suppose there is too little sense of community on the water; few people live here, after all, it's a weekend getaway for most. For those who work on the Sound daily, I imagine the grapevine fills much of the need for news. There are times I turn on the VHF just to listen in much the same way I used to habitually click over to CNN when I didn't have anything better to watch (although their ridiculous antics of late pretty much cured me of that even before I got rid of the television).

Well, I hadn't planned on writing about all this when I started out, but there you go. If anyone knows of a better source of local maritime news, let me know!