The Isles of Shoals Steamship Company offers a variety of cruises in their Victorian style steamship M/V Thomas Laighton. Routes include historic Portsmouth Harbor and the Isles of Shoals, a group of nine small islands five miles off the Atlantic coast. Enjoy tales pertaining to the ghosts, pirates, buried treasures, lighthouses, and other lore surrounding the Shoals. Services include daily Sightseeing Cruises, Dinner Cruises, Party Ships, and Fall Foliage Cruises to the Great Bay Wilderness Area. The boat offers a full-service bar/snack bar and is handicapped accessible. Private charters are welcomed. The downtown docking area offers easy access for coaches. For information, call 800-441-4620 or visit www.islesofshoals.com.

Portsmouth Harbor Cruises offers intimate jaunts through the Seacoast's most picturesque waterways aboard the Heritage. This 49-passenger classic offers up to eight cruises daily, including Portsmouth Harbor, Isles of Shoals, Evening/Sunset Cruises, Great Bay and Cocheco River Inland River Cruises, and Fall Foliage Cruises. For information, call 800-776-0915 or visit www.portsmouthharbor.com. For small groups (limit 6 passengers), Tug Alley Too offers tours of the harbor aboard one of their feisty tugs. Info at (603) 430-9556 or www.tugboatalley.com. The Atlantic Whale Watch Company hosts whale watching tours out of beautiful Rye Harbor, a ten-minute drive from Portsmouth (tel. 800-942-5364). Groups are welcome and coach parking is available. Finally, for the fitness-minded, Portsmouth Kayak Adventures offers guided group kayak tours of Portsmouth’s inner bays. The staff can accommodate up to 40 people. Call for info at (603) 559-1000 or visit them online at www.portsmouthkayak.com.

The Gundalow Company offers a fascinating visitor experience aboard the last remaining gundalow in the Piscataqua region. A gundalow is a shallow drafted type of cargo ship, once common in the Gulf of Maine’s rivers and estuaries, which reached its prominence in the Great Bay of New Hampshire and Maine in the late 1800s. Carrying up to 50 tons of cargo and sometimes measuring more than 70 feet long and 19 feet wide, gundalows were the equivalent of today’s tractor-trailer rigs. Gundalows carried bricks from local brickyards to build the giant mill buildings found on the banks of area rivers. Granite for mill building foundations, cordwood, and later coal to power area mills, was also carried on gundalows. Today, visitors can board a reproduction gundalow, the Captain Edward H. Adams, honoring the last of the men who piloted gundalows on the rivers of the basin. The Capt. Adams moves from port to port in the Piscataqua region (including Portsmouth, Exeter, Dover and Durham) over the course of the summer and fall. Groups of up to 25 can board the gundalow for a half-hour visit. Group rates are $3 per person. For information visit www.gundalow.org, call (603) 433-9505, or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .