Wordpress 3.3.1, Atahualpa 3.7.3
Site: http://www.greatlakesvesselhistory.com

I'm looking for a suggestion for making the drop-down menu more usable. My elderly uncle has amassed around 2,000 ship histories and I've arranged them alphabetically by giving them each a parent of whatever their name begins with, but short of breaking down the alphabet into smaller chunks (AA-AE, AF-AM, etc...), is there another way to view a list of all the ships that start with a particular letter?

Thanks!

The first thing that comes to mind is a page for each letter that has links to all the boats in several columns. Then when you click on the home page menu you would just select a letter.

I've thought of doing that, but I was looking for a possible way to show more of the menu from the top dropdown - maybe displaying columns 3 or 4 wide?

Take a look at UberMenu from Code Canyon. There are a bunch of possible configurations that may work for you such as the MegaMenu.