Sublime

The company did its best to increase freight traffic, though, by building three huge ferries constructed especially to haul freight cars. These 360-foot ships—the Henry M. Flagler, the Joseph R. Parrott, and the Estrada Palma—were the largest train ferries in the world at that time, and were fitted with standard-gauge rails in their holds.

Oakland had never hosted a containership, but it immediately began to promote itself as a future containerport. Nutter dreamed up a lease very different from the norm of so many cents per ton: Sea-Land would pay a minimum fee high enough to cover the cost of building its terminal and would pay more as its tonnage rose, but beyond a certain point th

Consigning and expediting freight, he naturally learned quickly who was doing what and how things worked. He learned, for instance, how the steamship companies could price-gouge local consumers because of the lack of winter service.

Each vessel carried “Northern” as its first name, for instance Northern Light. And each embodied the same philosophy of massive tonnages and low rates that Hill and others were applying to rail transport.

We prowled the auction sites, craigslist up the east coast, then across the gulf coast, then large cities up and down the Mississippi River and Tombigbee internal waterway system, Chicago Nautical Donations, Deltaville Maritime Museum (field of Dreams), Cooper Specialty Salvage, eBay, Certified Sales and the other auction outlets. After a week we w

We now were almost ready to split for the lower Chesapeake and from there to the prime selling country of North Carolina’s Pamlico Sound where the New Bern and Oriental sailing communities waited for us with open checkbooks.