Hey, welcome to 59 degrees north with Andeshell. Enjoy the show.

Hey, hey, welcome back to 59 degrees north sailing podcast. It's Andy Shell here, and I am doing this intro from the docks of the Caribbean 1500 cruising rally here in Ocean Marine Yacht Center down in Port Smith, Virginia.

We've got a couple of days left till the start, and everyone's kind of hanging out, getting ready, getting their boats ready, last minute stuff. Going a little bit crazy. You can probably hear by my voice talking a little faster today that I'm going a bit crazy myself. But this is the fun part of the event. I mean, this is what we work for all year, and this is it. It's really cool helping out all these people down here. Anyway, this podcast I did with Joe Elder, who is the proprietor of Skipjack Nautical,

and it's this eclectic marine store here in Portsmouth just down the street,

and it's where we've done three of our happy hours this week.

The place is kind of like a museum. He's got hundreds of marine artifacts and

artwork and old swords and ships, clocks, and barometers, and portholes, and all kinds of stuff.

It's a big facility, several different rooms, and a really nice place to just. You can spend a day

in there looking at stuff, and especially if you're a history buff. He's got swords from the

War of 1812

and paintings from the 1700s of old tall ships and stuff it's fascinating place and Joe's a

fascinating guy um him and his wife Allison started the business 10 years ago um the first place was

burned uh actually it had there was a fire door, and the city bulldozed it after

condemning it, and they lost everything. Joe told me that crazy story. He also talked a bit about his

career as a marine archaeologist, an underwater archaeologist, I should say, him and his wife

Allison have dived in the English channel on shipwrecks and done a lot of shipwreck research

and stuff. So they're big divers. So Joe overall, I mean, he's a huge history buff. He's a

sailor as well. He got the idea to start Skipjack from being down in the BVI and visiting the

Puscer's stores of all things. He liked all the merchandise they had in Pusters, but yeah, nothing was for

sale. So he had that idea and that's how the business got started. So Joe also writes a bunch

of blogs. You can find those blogs as well as the website for Skipjack Nautical on www.

...com. They're also on Facebook, SkipjacknauticalWares, and they do a big mail-order business, so you can order stuff online if you see anything that you like. As usual, you can find me on Twitter at 59 North Sailing on Facebook, and also on the Carib 1500 page this week. We're at worldcruising.com slash Caribbean 1500.

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