How Boatnerd Came to Be

Website founder Neil Schultheiss shares the story of how Boatnerd was born

Growing up, family vacations were always to the water. When I was very young, we lived about 25 miles north of Detroit and I found I had a fascination with freighters and other work boats. I bought my first ship-to-shore scanner and I hooked it up to an external antenna and started listening to Sarnia traffic and other Detroit area radio ship communications. That really focused my interest in Great Lakes shipping, and I started looking for more information.

On a trip to Windsor to do some boat watching I found a copy of Know Your Ships in a bookstore – that was a big part of the inspiration for Boatnerd and the way it categorized, organized, and shared vessel information on the web.

In the early 1990s I was a student at Oakland University and had access to what were then called Usenet groups – text-based discussion forums organized by interest. I discovered one called Alt. Great Lakes. From that group I found there was a bigger interest in Great Lakes shipping than I realized, and so I started posting updates from the Detroit area – things I heard on my scanner. In the mid-’90s the World Wide Web came about in the version we know today, with text and graphics.

In the late 1990s, the World Wide Web had become mainstream, and everything was .com. A lot of sites used “nerd” in their names, and that’s where Boatnerd came from. My wife was working on her MBA at the time and was busy with school, which freed me up to really expand Boatnerd in the mid-to-late 1990s.

Boatnerd started small, with a few photo galleries, a few limited vessel passages, information on scanner frequencies, area museums and where to buy Great Lakes shipping-related items. As the site grew and had more people sending in information, the news page was launched. It soon became the standard for the Great Lakes shipping industry – a must-read every day by vessel enthusiasts and shipping industry professionals alike.

During that time I would work into the early morning editing the news and pictures for the news. On the back end, I had historians and journalists such as Al Miller and Roger LeLievre (of Know Your Ships) editing the news, putting out what I always thought was a high-quality product.

In 2003, when I started a master’s program, I stepped away from a lot of the daily workings of Boatnerd, but I stayed active as part of our new 501c3 non-profit organization formally known as Great Lakes & Seaway Shipping On-Line Inc., which is operated by a board of directors. This was set up with the help of Port Huron philanthropist Jim Acheson to assure the long-term viability of the site.

The site has gone through many version changes, and thanks to the dedication of many volunteers and contributors, the remains active and viable today, still offering information and bringing people with common interests together. This latest update is just the next step in Boatnerd’s continual evolution and we hope you find it enjoyable and easy to use.