About A Buoy

Sometime around when The Day After Tomorrow came out in theaters and yet another starlet got busted with a DUI, we gave up on feeling guilty for thinking disasters are fascinating. Whether it's on the news, reality TV or captured in an centuries-old oil painting (ever see John Singleton Copley's "Watson and the Shark"?), there's something surreal about observing chaos from a safe distance.

Combine that with every little kid's dream of being an explorer (sadly a less-viable career path in our big boring digital age, wah) and we guarantee you'll be transfixed by these shipwreck museums. A little nerdy? Affirmative, captain, but we can't say we blame you.

(Titanic-shaped ice cube by Fred Flare)

Maine Maritime Museum, Maine
Settled on the bank of the Kennebec River, you'll find artifacts both gigantic (the bow from a wrecked 157 ft. vessel) and tiny (carved Inuit ivory seals the size of pennies) and model boats to your heart's delight.

 www.mainemaritimemuseum.org

Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, Michigan

Make your way through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where the accents are extreme and the views are beautiful (that's not their slogan but it probably should be) and you'll find the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. The fact that it's located in a town called Paradise, well, that's a little too ironic to touch.

www.shipwreckmuseum.com

DiscoverSea Shipwreck Museum, Delaware
DiscoverSea boasts one of the largest collections of recovered artifacts in the Mid-Atlantic, so you're bound to get lost (figuratively and literally). You may just have to see the Spanish Atocha shipwreck from 1622 to believe it in 2009.

www.discoversea.com

Key West Shipwreck Historeum and Museum
Between assigning its staff titles like "Master Wrecker" and encouraging visitors to scale a 65-foot lookout tower, it seems like the Shipwreck Historeum is on a Pirates of the Caribbean high. Smells like awesome to us.

www.shipwreckhistoreum.com

Nantucket Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum
For those of you lucky enough to escape to Nantucket this summer, allow us to remind you of the treacherous shoals and conditions that earned the island the title "graveyard of the Atlantic" -- sorry, we had to. The museum's five major shipwrecks will keep you busy regardless of the weather.

www.nantucketlifesavingmuseum.com

EMMY BLOTNICK