2017 Wooden Boat Festival

While on a seminar in Southeast Alaska, Crusader ran aground on a spring tide. After nearly losing the boat, Jonathan vowed to learn more about this mysterious and implacable force. Ten years of research took him to five continents where he saw the largest, fastest, scariest and most amazing tides in the world. With Lukasi Nappaaluk, an Inuit elder, he slithered through a hole in the arctic ice and gathered mussels in the dark cavities left behind by a dropping tide. In China, he witnessed the world’s largest tidal bore, a 25-foot wave that charges upriver at twenty miles an hour. And at the Royal Society of London, he learned that Plato and Aristotle, Leonardo de Vinci, Newton, Descartes, and many other noted thinkers had been captivated – and befuddled — by the tide’s mystery. The book that led to Galileo’s arrest for heresy by the Catholic Church, in fact, was a treatise originally called “The Flux and Reflux of the Tides.” It’s been that important to mankind for centuries. But the story has never been properly told.