Standing out in a sea of maritime events 

Snapshot of FERRIES attendees at growing conference in New York area.

As 2023 neared its close, Marine Log finished up its conference calendar by drawing a record attendance for its long running FERRIES event with over 250 attendees—60 of them ferry operators.  

While there are multiple maritime events on the calendar, ranging from the super colossal to the highly specialized, our focus at our events is to bring our audience content that they can learn from, contribute to and care about.  

While we haven’t quite found the perfect recipe to the “perfect” maritime event, we are working toward that goal. This year, we launched our first Ship Repair USA event back in June, which was a near sold out success. We plan to bring this event back to New Orleans next June, where we will continue to focus on ship repair, ship maintenance, and vessel through-life maintenance. And, building on this year’s success, we will once again team up with the Military Sealift Command.  

Prior to Ship Repair USA, we held our annual TTB (Tugs, Towboats & Barges) conference in March in Mobile, Ala. Due to COVID, this was the first in person, non-virtual TTB event that I was able to attend since its renaming from Tugs & Barges. When I came onboard in 2019, I wanted to open the event up to the inland sector as well since I felt—and still feel—tugs and towboats can learn a lot from each other. Not to mention, there are many common suppliers, regulations, shipyards, etc., involved with both brown and blue water vessels here in the U.S.  

TTB will make its return to Mobile on March 6-7, where we will focus on meeting new market trends and needs.  

We wrapped up the year, as noted, with FERRIES, which was again held in the New York City area. Next year the event will be held in November in another area where ferries play a vital role on the regional economy: Seattle. 

We know that the maritime calendar is crowded. Our aim is always to deliver events that come up to attendee expectations by delivering the right balance of lessons learned from experience, explorations of new challenges and solutions and, of course, networking opportunities. 

The key to reaching that balance is input from our attendees and our readership — so if you have thoughts and conference content and direction to share with us, we really do welcome and value them.