Norman Reilly Raine's stories of the salty tugboat captain Annie Brennan, a character based on the life of Thea Foss,[1] first appeared in prose form in the weekly US journal Saturday Evening Post in the late 1920s.

Elsa Lanchester, Jay C. Flippen, and Chill Wills were all in line for major roles at one point or another at this early stage.

The series was filmed in Toronto harbor and was first shown in Canada, having attracted ratings good enough to interest American television stations.

What had succeeded in Canada proved a disappointment in the United States, where the viewing audiences had presumably become accustomed to greater sophistication than the simplistic humor of this series.

Annie Brennan, widowed and the former skipper of a garbage scow, now captains a ship owned by the Severn Tugboat Company.