I updated the Merchant Vessels of the United States database today. That’s a big file (~375k entries) and it serves as an interesting collection of personal and merchant vessels.
(There’s a minor error in the import, in that about 10% of the entries – in the Os through Rs – are duplicated. I’m working on correcting that problem. Also, apologies about the layout in this blog post, particularly with the tables. Not sure what the problem is, but I’ll try to correct it.)
Unfortunately, the US Coast Guard has changed their system, and NOAA has dropped their version of the database altogether, so you can no longer link directly to a specific ship. This is very frustrating, but I can’t control other sites’ setups. The URL will take you to the search page, and you can search again for the ship name that you’d found in ShipIndex.
The Coast Guard has also removed tons of personal information about owners of recreational vessels. The remaining information will still be useful to some.
MVUS also creates an interesting opportunity to look at a really large data set, and get a good sense of what vessel names are most appealing to the most people in the US.