Sound Harbor Marine Logistics Charts New Routes From Norwalk

Dana Kilbride grew up watching her father run a two-boat towing operation out of Norwalk Harbor, ferrying construction materials and fuel barges along Long Island Sound in all weather. She swore for years she would never join the family business. "I went to college for marine engineering specifically so I could work on bigger ships, somewhere else," Kilbride said, laughing, from the deck of Sound Harbor Marine Logistics' newest tug. "Then my dad's knees gave out, and here I am."

What began in 2011 as Kilbride reluctantly taking over her father's aging fleet has become Sound Harbor Marine Logistics, a maritime services company operating six vessels and a barge fleet that moves aggregate, fuel, and construction materials between Connecticut's coastal municipalities and terminals across the Sound. The company now employs 38 people, including licensed captains, deckhands, and a small logistics coordination team that Kilbride built from scratch.

Modernizing an Old-Fashioned Business

When Kilbride took over, the business ran largely on paper manifests and phone calls, a system her father had used successfully for decades but one she felt limited the company's ability to compete for larger contracts. She invested early profits into a digital scheduling and tracking system, allowing clients to see real-time barge locations and delivery windows. "Construction companies don't want to guess when their materials are showing up," she said. "That system alone won us contracts we wouldn't have gotten otherwise."

The modernization did not come without friction. Several longtime employees, including two captains who had worked with her father for over a decade, initially resisted the changes. Kilbride says she won them over gradually by proving the new systems reduced idle time rather than adding bureaucracy. "Once they saw it meant less waiting around at the dock, not more paperwork, they came around," she said.

Navigating a Consolidating Industry

Maritime services along the Connecticut coast have consolidated significantly over the past decade, with several small operators either closing or selling to larger regional players. Kilbride says Sound Harbor has fielded multiple acquisition offers but has turned them down, preferring to grow organically. "I didn't rebuild this fleet to hand it to a private equity firm that's never set foot on a barge," she said.

Serving Norwalk's Working Waterfront

Kilbride has become an advocate for preserving Norwalk's working waterfront amid pressure to redevelop harbor-adjacent land for residential and commercial use. She has testified before the city's harbor commission arguing that marine services jobs, often overlooked in discussions about the waterfront's future, remain vital to the region's construction and energy supply chains. "People see the harbor and think restaurants and condos," she said. "They don't think about where the gravel for their new condo's foundation actually comes from."

The company recently added a fourth barge to handle growing demand from coastal construction projects and is in talks to expand fuel-transport services to a neighboring county. Kilbride says her father, now retired, still shows up at the dock most mornings to needle her about scheduling decisions. "He'll never fully let go," she said. "Honestly, neither will I, someday. I understand him a lot better now than I did at twenty-two."