Welcome back! New TinPan game this is massive
Your skills as a game maker must have expanded while you were away, you've added a cohesive story and fun lil cutscene which was actually quite amusing, the gameplay is solid and enjoyable, ironically enough I find that the slower you get the harder the game becomes, I don't think this was intentional but the slower your ship gets the more frequent you see ships, which could be that we're getting closer to shore and makes me feel like I'm making progress.
The only gripe I really have is the fact that the tutorial menu gets in the way of the oncoming ships and doesn't wait for you to press "OK" or something so that you're ready to play and not tossed in, also the buoys and speed up things sometimes spawn inside of other boats, im not quite sure how you could fix that but that is also something thats mildly a pain in the arse.
However those are so minor that I don't think i can take points off for it, this is pretty fun and I love the song choice, cant go wrong with the newgrounds flash classic ParagonX9!