Seagoing Women (At Work)

Through vivid first-person accounts and a wealth of images, journalist and mariner Sara Donnelly creates captivating portraits of thirty-three women who have built remarkable careers on the water, as everything from tugboat operators and commercial fishers to naval architects and whale researchers.

Drawing from in-depth interviews and personal archives, Seagoing Women offers a rare look at offshore life: the physical demands, long stretches away from home, ingenuity required in unpredictable conditions and deep sense of purpose shared by those whose lives are tied to the ocean. The women featured reflect a wide range of backgrounds, geographies and paths into the industry. Among them are:

• Indigenous kelp harvester Shaelynne Bood, who is carrying forward a thriving kelp-harvesting enterprise in her home territory. Her operation, which supplies companies including cosmetics giant La Mer, is grounded in family knowledge, sustainable harvest practices and traditional ecological stewardship.
• Underwater videographer and marine artist Tiare Boyes, whose diving, photography and ocean-plastics sculpture reveal the hidden richness of underwater ecosystems while advocating for coastal conservation.
• Weyla Chipps of the Scia’new First Nation, who, after raising four children and working as an education assistant, seized the chance to train for a new life at sea: working on anchor handlers in the North Sea and embarking on adventures through the Bermuda Triangle and along the Panama Canal.

Other profiles include a veteran mariner who rose from a chance deckhand job to decades of command, a marine engineer who crossed hemispheres to work offshore and a mariner with a generations-long boatbuilding pedigree who now travels the uncharted waters of the Arctic aboard a research vessel when she’s not home in Nova Scotia restoring her family’s classic wooden boats. Each story highlights determination, skill and resilience in a profession defined by adventure, challenge and reward.

With her concise, engaging introductions to these women, and with the stories she assembles from first-hand interviews and correspondence, Donnelly creates a detailed picture of a world in which hard work, risk and long absences are compensated by what one seafarer describes as “a life that is beautiful, rewarding and full of adventure.”