Patricia Martinson just can’t get the sea out of her blood.

The 95-year-old worked as a naval reserve during World War II, and then spent 33 years as an officer in the British Merchant Navy.

"Three big ships and two harbour tankers, and that took me up until 1952," explains Martinson.

For the past quarter century the Irish-born sailor has been off the water, but still very close to it, as a valuable team member at Halifax's Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.

Martinson seems to remember almost everything that she's been involved in for more than nine decades.

Those memories include an afternoon in 1944, when the Fort Stikine, a ship loaded with munitions and other cargo caught fire at what is now Mumbai, India.

Martinson worked in a Royal Navy dockyard about a mile away.

"At six minutes past 4:00, the ship blew up, and no trace of Captain Naismith or Chief Officer Henderson was ever found," Martinson recalls.

But that's just one of her many fascinating stories.

"I was amazed at her recollection, and story-telling to fine detail, about her experience of being a first responder," says Adrienne Omansky, a visitor to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.

Martinson became an employee of the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic 25 years ago. Now she volunteers, sharing her wealth of knowledge about the history of ships.

Whether it's the finer points of navigating by the sun and stars, or explaining the purpose of a chronometer onboard ship.

"It is a very good clock, of which you know how much is gaining or losing," explains Martinson.

Martinson still has the charts and calculation sheets she used in a career on the sea spanning from the Second World War, to 1980.

"The navigation equipment, the sextant, she knows all the math, and that's not even taught in nautical schools anymore, it's all electronics now," explains Derek Harrison of the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.

"We asked her, did someone teach her? Through the family, she said, she taught herself," says Hazem Idleb, Museum Visitor.

"She also used to work on our ship, CSS Acadia. Painting, doing knotwork, doing brasswork," recalls Harrison.

Between the British Merchant Navy, service in the Korean War and her commercial shipping career, Martinson travelled the world.

While she now longer sails, Martinson can be found telling stories of the sea every Tuesday and Thursday at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.

With files from CTV Atlantic's Ron Shaw.