The Trouble with Pinning Down Maritime Maritime Activity Reports, Inc. Rik van Hemmen , Contributor Rik van Hemmen is the President of Martin & Ottaway... June 9, 2026 Copyright rabbit75_fot/AdobeStock Connecticut Maritime Association has decided to move its annual meeting and exposition to Houston for the coming year. In the last few years attendance has shrunk and I suppose leadership thinks that Houston has more potential to draw interest from the maritime community. This leaves me to wonder what the “Maritime Community” actually is. Connecticut Maritime Association had an interesting origin. In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s many bulk ship owner/operators got sick of the long commute into New York City and decided to move their offices to Stamford Connecticut, where a number of these owners lived. Soon more owners and operators followed suit and Stamford and surroundings became a mini hotbed of commercial maritime. Not all maritime moved to Stamford. Container shipping companies moved to the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, and in those days, this resulted in a weird vacuum in New York City. Soon underwriters and naval architects started to move their staff out of the city, and ABS moved to Paramus, NJ. I am not sure the move to Paramus was ever well thought out and by the 90’s ABS had decamped to Houston. I have been told these moves were driven by ABS top leadership, where they simply moved the whole operation to the location where top leadership lived. Noting that with ever improving instant communications there was no reason to stay in New York City, other companies decamped to even more random locations such as Florida, Newport RI, Norfolk, VA and even inland locations such as Atlanta and Raleigh, North Carolina. Everybody thought that New York city as a maritime hub was toast, and meanwhile it appeared that Houston was the new maritime hotbed, with Connecticut a solid but eventually declining mini hotbed. CMA ran incredibly successful annual conf