Ships at sea cannot exchange data among them easily so far. Basically voice-oriented communication systems are the main methods, some of them utilize the HF radio systems at lower bit rates, and for higher bit rates, the Inmarsat or VSAT are adopted. None of them are used widely because of lower qualities and higher costs. There exist many technical and economical limits to have the Internet service just like on land such as the WWW service. In order to achieve the improved transmission rates of the maritime communication networks at farther sea, MANET(Mobile Ad Hoc Network) is one of the most practical models. In this paper, a new routing protocol named EZR (Expansive Search Zone Routing Protocol) is proposed, which is based on SANET (Ship Ad Hoc Network) model that has some different features from MANET and VANET (Vehicular Ad Hoc Network). The search zone for the shortest path is firstly found by EZR. If no path is searched in the zone, the zone is expanded according to the rule of EZR. The zone-expanding and path-searching procedures are repeated until the path is found out. The performance of EZR is evaluated and compared with LAR protocol which is one of the most typical routing protocols based on geographical information. The simulated results show that EZR is much better than LAR at sea environments in terms of routing success rate, route optimality, and a single index of performance combined the previous two metrics.