What’s Happening In Your Parks – Charleston County Parks
Hot Summer Nights
Find your chill – plus a frosty beverage – at our next Reggae Nights concert! On July 11, bring your blanket and chairs to James Island County Park for a kick-back-and-relax evening of good vibes and great music.
Save the Date
Get ready for the social event of the season: Dog Day Afternoon! The Charleston County waterparks are going to the dogs for three bark-tastic days this year, so Lowcountry canines (and their humans) can choose from a trio of dates and locations. Tickets are on sale now, but don’t wait: these pool parties sell out fast!
Mystical Moths
Stop swatting and start oohing and ahhing! On July 25, join our insect whisperer at Caw Caw to learn all about the ethereal winged wonders flitting through the summer darkness. Reserve your space today for this nocturnal stroll through the park.
Breathe Deep…
On July 10, salute the setting sun and show off your star pose during Starlight Yoga. The soft sands and warm breezes of Folly Beach will be your studio for the evening as a certified instructor guides you through this all-levels, flowing yoga class. Register online
Birds-eye View
Beat the heat when you hang with the early birds! This month’s bird walks dawn bright and early in the Charleston County parks, home to some of the Lowcountry’s most diverse bird habitats. Take your pick of strolls through Lighthouse Inlet Heritage Preserve, Stono River County Park, Caw Caw Interpretive Center…or join our birding experts for all three!
I found this article to be fascinating since I have entered many of these inlets while cruising up and down the East Coast. It is interesting to read about the rich history of many of them.
Cruisers Net publishes Loose Cannon articles with Captain Swanson’s permission in hopes that mariners with salt water in their veins will subscribe. $7 a month or $56 for the year, and you may cancel at any time.
A boat is blown aground during Hurricane Matthew in Florida.
The author is a meteorologist and research program manager at University of Wisconsin-Madison. This story was first published in The Conversation and is reprinted here with permission.
By CHRIS VAGASKY
About 600 miles off the west coast of Africa, large clusters of thunderstorms begin organizing into tropical storms every hurricane season. They aren’t yet in range of Hurricane Hunter flights, so forecasters at the National Hurricane Center rely on weather satellites to peer down on these storms and beam back information about their location, structure and intensity.
The satellite data helps meteorologists create weather forecasts that keep planes and ships safe and prepare countries for a potential hurricane landfall.
Now, meteorologists are about to lose access to three of those satellites.
On June 25, 2025, the Trump administration issued a service change notice announcing that the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, DMSP, and the Navy’s Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center would terminate data collection, processing and distribution of all DMSP data no later than June 30. The data termination was postponed until July 31 following a request from the head of NASA’s Earth Science Division.
I am a meteorologist who studies lightning in hurricanes and helps train other meteorologists to monitor and forecast tropical cyclones. Here is how meteorologists use the DMSP data and why they are concerned about it going dark.
Looking Inside the Clouds
At its most basic, a weather satellite is a high-resolution digital camera in space that takes pictures of clouds in the atmosphere.
These are the satellite images you see on most TV weather broadcasts. They let meteorologists see the location and some details of a hurricane’s structure, but only during daylight hours.
Hurricane Flossie spins off the Mexican coast on July 1, 2025. Images show the top of the hurricane from space as day turns to night. NOAA GOES
Meteorologists can use infrared satellite data, similar to a thermal imaging camera, at all hours of the day to find the coldest cloud-top temperatures, highlighting areas where the highest wind speeds and rainfall rates are found.
But while visible and infrared satellite imagery are valuable tools for hurricane forecasters, they provide only a basic picture of the storm. It’s like a doctor diagnosing a patient after a visual exam and checking their temperature.
Infrared bands show more detail of Hurricane Flossie’s structure on July 1, 2025. NOAA GOES
For more accurate diagnoses, meteorologists rely on the DMSP satellites.
The three satellites orbit Earth 14 times per day with special sensor microwave imager/sounder instruments, or SSMIS. These let meteorologists look inside the clouds, similar to how an MRI in a hospital looks inside a human body. With these instruments, meteorologists can pinpoint the storm’s low-pressure center and identify signs of intensification.
Precisely locating the center of a hurricane improves forecasts of the storm’s future track. This lets meteorologists produce more accurate hurricane watches, warnings and evacuations.
Hurricane track forecasts have improved by up to 75 percent since 1990. However, forecasting rapid intensification is still difficult, so the ability of DMPS data to identify signs of intensification is important.
About 80 percent of major hurricanes – those with wind speeds of at least 111 mph (179 kilometers per hour)—rapidly intensify at some point, ramping up the risks they pose to people and property on land. Finding out when storms are about to undergo intensification allows meteorologists to warn the public about these dangerous hurricanes.
Where Are Defense Satellites Going?
NOAA’s Office of Satellite and Product Operations described the reason for turning off the flow of data as a need to mitigate “a significant cybersecurity risk.”
The three satellites have already operated for longer than planned.
The DMSP satellites were launched between 1999 and 2009 and were designed to last for five years. They have now been operating for more than 15 years. The United States Space Force recently concluded that the DMSP satellites would reach the end of their lives between 2023 and 2026, so the data would likely have gone dark soon.
Replacements for the DMSP Satellites?
Three other satellites in orbit – NOAA-20, NOAA-21 and Suomi NPP – have a microwave instrument known as the advanced technology microwave sounder.
The advanced technology microwave sounder, or ATMS, can provide data similar to the special sensor microwave imager/sounder, or SSMIS, but at a lower resolution. It provides a more washed-out view that is less useful than the SSMIS for pinpointing a storm’s location or estimating its intensity.
Images of Hurricane Erick off the coast of Mexico, viewed from NOAA-20’s ATMS (left) and DMPS SSMIS (right) on June 18 show the difference in resolution and the higher detail provided by the SSMIS data. U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, via Michael Lowry
ML-1A is a microwave satellite that will help replace some of the DMSP satellites’ capabilities. However, the government hasn’t announced whether the ML-1A data will be available to forecasters, including those at the National Hurricane Center.
Why Are Satellite Replacements Last Minute?
Satellite programs are planned over many years, even decades, and are very expensive. The current geostationary satellite program launched its first satellite in 2016 with plans to operate until 2038. Development of the planned successor for GOES-R began in 2019.
Similarly, plans for replacing the DMSP satellites have been underway since the early 2000s.
Scientists prepare a GOES-R satellite for packing aboard a rocket in 2016. NASA/Charles Babir
Delays in developing the satellite instruments and funding cuts caused the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System and Defense Weather Satellite System to be canceled in 2010 and 2012 before any of their satellites could be launched.
The 2026 NOAA budget request includes an increase in funding for the next-generation geostationary satellite program, so it can be restructured to reuse spare parts from existing geostationary satellites. The budget also terminates contracts for ocean color, atmospheric composition and advanced lightning mapper instruments.
A Busy Season Remains
The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30, is forecast to be above average, with six to 10 hurricanes. The most active part of the season runs from the middle of August to the middle of October, after the DMSP satellite data is set to be turned off.
Hurricane forecasters will continue to use all available tools, including satellite, radar, weather balloon and dropsonde data, to monitor the tropics and issue hurricane forecasts. But the loss of satellite data, along with other cuts to data, funding and staffing, could ultimately put more lives at risk.
LOOSE CANNON covers hard news, technical issues and nautical history. Every so often he tries to be funny. Subscribe for free to support the work. If you’ve been reading for a while—and you like it—consider upgrading to paid.
I found this article to be fascinating since I have entered many of these inlets while cruising up and down the East Coast. It is interesting to read about the rich history of many of them.
Cruisers Net publishes Loose Cannon articles with Captain Swanson’s permission in hopes that mariners with salt water in their veins will subscribe. $7 a month or $56 for the year, and you may cancel at any time.
Ocracoke Island villagers salvage lumber from the shattered hull of the schooner Nomis in the summer of 1935. Nomis was carrying 338,000 feet of lumber from Georgetown, South Carolina, to New York City.
Okay, its Fourth of July weekend, so the theme of this Loose Cannon installment is light and playful: Trivia related to various inlets along the Atlantic Coast from Virginia to the Florida border. I was digging for something in my archives, and I found historical summaries written over a decade ago but never published.
Not all inlets are mentioned, and Charleston is omitted altogether because of its historic significance defies pithy summarization. And please do not assume that just because an inlet is included it is recommended for navigation.
Enjoy.
Virginia
Rudee
What is now Rudee Inlet began as a manmade drainage culvert. In 1968, the state created the current inlet, part of a $1 million plan to attract boaters. Now regular dredging is part of a cycle of a system to replenishment sand on the beaches of Virginia Beach. You can often see East Coast Navy SEAL teams launching boats for training exercises here.
Navy SEAL stealth boat goes for a spin at Rudee Inlet, Virginia Beach.
North Carolina
Oregon
In 1873 Congress approved and appropriated funds for the building of 29 lifesaving stations, one of which was the Bodie Island Station, located on the south side of Oregon Inlet. In 1883, the station on the north side of Oregon Inlet (also known as Tommy’s Hummock) was officially named the Bodie Island Station and the “old” Bodie Island Station (south of the inlet) was renamed as the Oregon Inlet Station. These are the antecedents to the current Coast Guard Station on Bodie.
Hatteras
The first Hatteras Inlet was formed south of the current inlet, but closed around 1764. The modern Hatteras Inlet was formed on September 7, 1846 by a violent gale. This was the same storm that opened present-day Oregon Inlet to the north. This became a profitable inlet, because it gave the Inner Banks, a quicker and easier way to travel to and from the Gulf Stream. It was easier to come into this inlet from the north.
Because of the increase of commerce, Hatteras Village Post Office was established in 1858. The initial invasion of the North Carolina coast, on Hatteras Island, during the Civil War called Battle of Hatteras Inlet Batteries came from Hatteras Inlet. The two Confederate forts guarding the inlet quickly fell. The Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum is also located here. Need we say more?
Ocracoke
The residents of this area have stoutly resisted modernization and change and a visit here is very much a trip back to the way it used to be. Ocracoke is part of the area known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic, due to the many shipwrecks over the centuries—more than 600, according to some sources.
Home to whalers and Spanish privateers in the 18th century, Cape Lookout Bight is the location of the distinctively diamond patterned Cape Lookout Lighthouse. The wreck of the schooner Chrissie Wright occurred here on Lookout Shoals, where the entire crew but the cook perished in view of shore, rescuers unable to reach them until the next day due to the large breakers.
Beaufort
Pirate Edward Teach, popularly known as Blackbeard, lost his ship Queen Ann’s Revenge in 1718 after running aground at Beaufort Inlet. There is a fascinating multimedia display at the Beaufort Maritime Museum on his story, and the continuing excavation of his vessel. Blackbeard was later killed by naval forces off Ocracoke, but his head came home through Beaufort inlet, hanging on the bowsprit of the ship which captured him.
Mason
In March 2002, Mason inlet was cut through at a location about 3,500 feet northeast of what was then Mason Inlet. A week after the successful opening of the new inlet, the old Mason Inlet was closed. This engineering work, sponsored by local interests, was in response to the southward migration of Mason Inlet over the years to the point were it was threatening to undermine the Shell Island Resort and community to the south.
Masonboro
In November 1862, Union warships forced blockade running British schooner F.W. Pindar aground at the inlet, and sent a boat crew to destroy the vessel. The boat swamped and the crew was captured after successfully firing the schooner. In the same month, the Union Navy ran the British bark Sophia aground and destroyed her near the inlet as well.
Carolina Beach
Shoaling closed the original inlet in the early 1900s. It was blasted open again with explosives in 1952. In 2007, $1.2 million in federal funds were allocated for dredging Carolina Beach Inlet.
Cape Fear River
Cape Fear’s moniker comes from the fearsome Frying Pan Shoals offshore. This area marks the southern border of the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Bald Head Lighthouse, long known as “Old Baldy,” was North Carolina’s first lighthouse, dating back to 1796. Legendary 19th century singlehander Joshua Slocum came ashore in this region while returning from South America in a small vessel he built and wrote about in his book “Voyage of the Liberdade.”
Lockwood’s Folly
Lockwoods Folly Inlet was the scene of several Civil War confrontations. In an area noted as the Cape Fear Civil War Shipwreck District (shown here from a U.S. Army Corps survey chart), which crosses the inlet itself, are found the wrecks of Lisa Marie, Elizabeth, Iron Age and Bendigo. The name ‘Lockwood’s Folly’ came about when a certain Mr. Lockwood built himself a boat, which happened to have draft too great to transit the inlet. Some things haven’t changed.
Shallotte
The entire coastal area was a hotspot of activity during the Civil War. The Union gunship Penobscot, at 158 feet and 10-foot 6-inch draft, destroyed her first Confederate vessel, the schooner Sereta, which went aground and was abandoned off Shallotte Inlet in June 1862. In November, the Penobscot forced the British ship Pathfinder aground at Shallotte Inlet, then destroyed her. Penobscot was known as the “90-day gunship” for the length of time it took to build her.
A “90-day-gunship,” sister ship to the USS Penobscot.
South Carolina
Little River Inlet
Because of the marshes surrounding Little River, the area received little land traffic until roads were built in the 1920s. Along with the safety afforded by the harbor, it thus became somewhat of a haven for pirates and smugglers. Following the arrival of some ‘northerners’ after the War of 1812, the town was known as “Yankee Town,” certainly not a name fondly accepted by those born there.
Murrells Inlet
Close by Murrells Inlet lies Drunken Jack Island—and Drunken Jack. Legend has it that a pirate was accidentally marooned with nothing but a supply of rum. When the ship finally returned, all they found were empty bottles of rum, and the bones of poor Jack. The island is also another of those reputed to contain Blackbeard’s treasure.
Winyah Bay
The first Europeans to settle the banks of Winyah Bay were actually the Spanish, but after failing as farmers, they built a ship from the towering cypress and oak trees lining the swamps, and sailed off to the Spice Islands of the Caribbean, where there was a ready market for their slaves.
Stono River
Union naval forces controlled the Stono River during the Civil War, but got their comeuppance when a Confedate artillery unit set up on the banks by cover of darkness, bombarded a Union warship and forced her officers to row ashore to surrender.
North Edisto River
The North Edisto River inlet was often used as a back door for Union vessels to attack Charleston, as any vessel proceeding through the Charleston inlet was a sitting duck, unable to return fire with while inbound with Fort Moultrie forward of the alignment of her guns.
St. Helena Sound
St. Helena Island is considered the center of African American Gullah culture and is also the site of several forts which have been extensively excavated. During the Civil War, Fort Walker fell early, leading to the capture of Port Royal. The slaves were freed and measures, including land grants, were undertaken to assist them. Black history is such a powerful force in this area that those supporting the Gullah culture have been able to prevent the building of condos and gated communities on St. Helena Island.
Portrait of a Gullah community after the Civil War.
New River Entrance
Camp Lejeune is located nearby and one will often see Marines on exercises. Kids will be thrilled as they roar by in their inflatable vessels, complete with weaponry, or operating tanks on the east side of the ICW or artillery towed behind trucks. Skippers knowing that this gear constitutes targets for shooting exercises may be a little less sanguine about them.
Port Royal Sound
Most mariners are aware that the Parris Island Marine Corps base is here. What most won’t know is that Cat Island, at the anchorage at Mile 544, was at one time a nudist colony. Hilton Head Island was at one time a prominent outpost of the Gullah community. (The nudist colony closed prior to World War II in case you were wondering!)
Calibogue Sound
This entire area was fought over by the Spanish, French and British for years, and the coast was a favorite hunting ground for pirates, including Blackbeard. The area is noted for its Gullah heritage. Today, most of the coast is a major resort region, with golf on Hilton Head Island. being one of the biggest draws. The red-striped replica lighthouse at Harbortown Yacht Basin is one of the most photographed sights on the Waterway.
Georgia
Savannah River
This entire area was fought over by the Spanish, French and British for years, and the coast was a favorite hunting ground for pirates, including Blackbeard. The area is noted for its Gullah heritage. Colonial Savannah, an early “planned city” (by Gen. James Oglethorpe), is regarded as one of the most beautiful in the United States.
Wassaw Sound
Thunderbolt was supposedly named after a lighting bolt struck there, creating a spring and giving native Americans a reason to settle there.
Ossaba Sound
Archeological evidence indicates Ossabaw Island has been inhabited for 4,000 years. During the last century it was a hunting retreat and then, a privately held scholarly and artistic retreat. When the owners could no longer subsidize the cost, they sold the island to the state of Georgia, thus preserving its natural beauty for the enjoyment of future generations.
St. Catherines Sound
A Spanish fort dating from 1566 was built on St. Catherines Island, which General Sherman awarded to freed slaves after the Civil war along with Ossabaw and Sapelo islands. This state of affairs lasted for two years, after which the island was returned to its former owner, and the new residents relocated to the Georgia mainland. An 1893 hurricane covered the entire island in water. Only one person survived.
Sapelo Sound
Sapelo Island’s ownership makes for a fascinating story. Fleeing revolution at home, a syndicate of French nobles purchased it in 1790, followed by a Danish sea captain, then a planter who was the only one who ever managed to make a profit from the island’s soil. In the 20th century, an excutive of the Hudson Motorcar Company, took possession, but the Crash of ’29 forced him to sell to R.J. Reynolds of tobacco fame. In 1969, Reynold’s widow donated part of it to the state of Georgia for a wildlife refuge. Now the entire island has protected status under government ownership.
An old Coast Guard photo of the Sapelo Island lighthouse.
Doboy Sound
Cruisers using this inlet may well notice mounds of large rocks not native to the area, particularly on Commodore Island. These are ballast stones from tallships which used these waters in past centuries, tossed overboard to lighten them so they could navigate the shallower waters upstream with their cargoes.
St. Simons Sound
Originally built in 1808, St. Simons lighthouse was torn down by Confederate forces in 1862 and replaced in 1872. In 1953, the oil lamps were replaced by a Fresnel lens and the 106 foot structure can be climbed. The view is worth the effort.
St. Andrews Sound
The lighthouse on Little Cumberland Island operated from 1838 until its deactivation in 1915. The keeper’s house was destroyed by fire in 1968.
St. Mary’s Inlet
Fernandina Beach on the Florida side was founded by Union soldiers, who returned there after having occupied Amelia Island during the war; they were drawn to the area’s climate and natural beauty. That may explain why the city’s downtown resembles a 19th Century New England town.
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Cruisers Net is proud to be a member of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway Association, whose lobbying work is crucial to keeping the Waterway navigable and safe. Your membership dollars directly support their vital work. Please join and encourage your boating neighbors to do the same, regardless of their home port.
Recent Actions and Upcoming Congressional Hearings on FY26 Federal Appropriations
In contrast to a very busy May for waterway federal funding news, June has been relatively quiet as Congress’s attention is focused on consideration of the reconciliation package, also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill. With recent passage of different versions of the reconciliation package by the House of Representatives and Senate, the Senate version was sent to the House for further consideration on July 1st. At present, we await a final vote by the House to pass the Senate version and send to the President for his signature and enactment. Fortunately, the voting on this bill will not impact the timing of consideration for the FY26 Energy & Water Appropriations bill which funds projects along the waterway.
Looking forward
With the release of the Administration’s FY26 funding priorities for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the next step is for the House and Senate to develop their appropriations bills. On July 7th, the House Appropriations’ Subcommittee on Energy & Water Development and Related Agencies has scheduled a committee hearing to consider the FY26 Energy & Water Appropriations Bill followed by a full House Appropriations Committee hearing on July 10th. Once the appropriations bill clears these two committees, it is eligible for a vote by the full House of Representatives.
At this time, the Senate has not scheduled committee hearings on FY26 Energy & Water Development Appropriations.
Below is a table outlining our recent success and the current state of waterway funding. It is possible that we could surpass the $220 million in waterway funding over the past five years with another successful funding cycle in 2026.
U.S. Coast Guard Releases Two Marine Safety Information Bulletins Impacting Waterway Users in North Carolina
The U.S. Coast Guard has recently released two Marine Safety Information Bulletins (MSIB) that will have a direct impact on waterway users in North Carolina. The AIWA was engaged on both of these MSIB’s, and we greatly appreciate the opportunity to participate in the review of the two projects.
The second project, the Onslow Bridge Replacement Project (MSIB-008-25), the waterway will be closed for daily demolition activities but will open daily between noon and 1pm, and outside of normal working hours.Please click here to read MSIB 08-25 for the project.
We understand that any closure of the waterway impacts our members and waterway stakeholders, and we are committed to participating in these types of projects to ensure that your voice is heard.
Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway Association Annual Meeting November 18 – 20, 2025 Savannah, GA
The AIWA is a national non-profit organization with the mission of securing funding and support for the maintenance of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. We are the only organization dedicated to ensuring the future of the AIWW and proudly represent all stakeholders of the waterway.
Cruisers Net publishes Loose Cannon articles with Captain Swanson’s permission in hopes that mariners with salt water in their veins will subscribe. $7 a month or $56 for the year, and you may cancel at any time.
Four days: Three stories and one opinion piece about shennanigans in the Bahamas. Normally, I release stories on more of an every-other-day schedule.
Anyway, if you are among those who have now joined us because of the coverage of Bahamas cruising-fee hikes and moorings boondogle, welcome.
For those of you who are less interested in that topic, worry not. Loose Cannon will soon return to its normal nautical mix and to its normal pace.
And you are hereby spared a fifth story on the topic.
The story would have been about resurgent corruption in the Bahamas government, as it begins to assume the trappings of a narco-state, complete with a rise in gang violence and homicides. I have decided against a long-form treatment because the subject is not boat-specific enough. Someone should write it, though.
Cliff Notes Version
In writing their November indictment of 11 Bahamians, including high-ranking policemen, U.S. prosecutors set the stage for the arrests, describing the growth of Bahamas government corruption since the end of the Covid epidemic. Besides the actual defendants, the indictment repeatedly references “other corrupt officials” in “key government institutions.”
One defendant gave feds the name of “a high-ranking Bahamian politician” who had offered to commit the country’s entire law enforcement apparatus to moving cocaine in exchange for a $2 million payoff. If true, that sum must now be considered the going rate to purchase, or at least rent a leader of the Bahamian people.
Thankfully for the cruising crowd, most of the criminal violence isn’t happening in the Abacos, Exumas or Out Islands, but that does not mean we would be unaffected in the long run. One cannot help but catch a whiff of the same Nassau corruption in the mooring scheme and crazy fee increases. Both were rolled out with the kind of stealth and suddeness that suggest, as American prosecutors like to say, “a cognizance of guilt.”
The Bahamas enacted some anti-corruption laws in response to the drug scandal, but an opposing senator this week noted that the actual enforcement budget was only $30,000 and no results have been produced.
(By the way, it is not too farfetched to think that these laws may have been dictated to Bahamian leaders by the U.S. Justice Department via State, in exchange for not indicting that “high-ranking politician” and possibly destabilizing or—dare I say it—decapitating an allied government.)
Interestingly, the institutions that track government corruption around the world based on measurable factors do not rate the Bahamas all that high in malfeasance. My conclusion is that the rankings must be based on lagging indicators.
Altogether this is a tragic state of affairs, especially for honest Bahamians. Their island nation, a place of beauty, had also been a place of normalcy for cruisers, not beset by the thefts and thuggery of the lower Caribbean, nor the endemic official corruption at the retail level in many Latin American ports, nor the ever-shrinking options for anchoring of Florida waters.
Folks, I’m taking tomorrow off. Maybe Monday too.
As always, comes the pitch: If you’ve been with Loose Cannon for a while, and you like what you’ve been reading, and you can afford it, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. There’s more where this came from.
LOOSE CANNON is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support the work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
It is always important to ensure you are up to date on the legally required safety equipment and your boat and motor registrations. Consider taking advantage of SCDNR’s courtesy boat inspections during the July 4th weekend to ensure you are in compliance. Also, see the embedded link below to South Carolina’s boating regulations.
SCDNR to conduct courtesy boat inspections during July Fourth weekend Friday, Saturday and Sunday
SCDNR officers want to do everything possible to make sure boaters have a fun yet safe July Fourth holiday. Courtesy boating inspections will be offered at public boat landings around the state on Friday, Saturday and Sunday mornings.
In an effort to keep people and waterways safe during the Fourth of July weekend, the S.C. Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR) Law Enforcement Division will be conducting courtesy boat inspections at public boat landings around the state.
The July Fourth weekend is one of the busiest boating times of the year for South Carolina lakes and waterways and officers want to do everything possible to keep everyone’s weekend fun and safe.
SCDNR boating safety and enforcement officers will perform quick but thorough inspections for required safety equipment and proper boat and motor registrations. Those who are not in compliance with safety regulations or registration requirements will not be ticketed during the complimentary inspections. Instead, they will be given an opportunity to correct the problem before they launch their boat. SCDNR officers will also be available to answer questions and give boaters tips on how to stay safe on the water. The boating inspections will be conducted Friday, Saturday and Sunday, July 4-6.
To report boating violations such as reckless operation or an intoxicated boat operator, call the SCDNR toll-free, 24-hour hotline at 1-800-922-5431 or dial #DNR on your cell phone.
For a copy of South Carolina’s boating regulations, to find out about local boating safety courses, or to obtain a free float plan form, contact the SCDNR boating safety office at 1-800-277-4301 or visit http://www.dnr.sc.gov/education/boated.html.
July Fourth weekend boat inspection locations (all inspections are from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.):
Friday, July 4:
Spartanburg County: Lake Bowen
Pickens County: Twin Lakes
Fairfield County: Molly Creek
Lexington County: Lake Murray Dam
Horry County: Bass Pro Shop
Charleston County: Wapoo Cut Landing, ICW
Beaufort County: Battery Creek Boat Landing
Saturday, July 5:
Anderson County: River Fork Landing, Lake Hartwell
Oconee County: South Cove, Lake Keowee
Kershaw County: Clearwater Cove, Lake Wateree
Clarendon County: Alex Harvin Landing, Lake Marion
Berkeley County: Hatchery Landing
Charleston County: Remley’s Point
Charleston County: Buck Hall
Sunday, July 6:
McCormick County: Scott’s Ferry, Lake Thurmond
Greenwood County: Hwy. 72 Landing
Oconee County: Seneca Creek, Lake Hartwell
York County: Ebenezer Park
Lexington County: Lake Murray Dam
Beaufort County: Lemon Island Boat Ramp
Charleston County: Limehouse Landing
Georgetown County: Carroll Campbell Boat Ramp
South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, 260 D Epting Ln, West Columbia, SC 29172
Cruisers Net publishes Loose Cannon articles with Captain Swanson’s permission in hopes that mariners with salt water in their veins will subscribe. $7 a month or $56 for the year, and you may cancel at any time.
Like crypto currency, the carbon-exchange market is something oft mentioned but little understood, including by me. This story assumes the concept is not just a figment of our collective imagination.
A seagrass meadow: Where the moorings aren’t.
Stand by for Bahamas Moorings II. The sequel appears likely. The key to understanding the “insane” and ultimately unsuccessful first attempt to establish rental moorings in the Exumas appears to have been something as mundane as seagrass.
Not the actual turtle food: Seagrass, the idea.
The Bahamas are sitting on a “blue carbon” treasure trove whose jewels are seagrasses, salt marshes and mangroves. According to DBG, a player in the carbon-offset industry, the Bahamas has $50 billion-worth ready to sell.
So what did the Bahamas government do?
On January 23, it leased the seagrass component of said trove to a private company in exchange for a promise of three pennies for every future dollar earned from mooring rentals—an unknowable revenue-stream.
Bahamian leaders certainly must have known end of free anchoring would have been unpopular in its target market, foreign cruisers. Would we be willing to pay? That question is back again as cruising community reacts to the outrage of the day—a quintupling of entry fees.
Stench
The odor of corruption around that $2.5 million deal was so strong, that the same government that had secretly approved the project soon ordered that it “cease and desist” and that all moorings be removed. That was on February 23, and…goshdarnit… The moorings are still in place. Free, at least temporarily.
Creating a mooring monopoly “doesn’t even make sense,” Peter Maury told The Tribune newspaper of Nassau as it followed up after Loose Cannon broke the story back in February. Maury is president of the Association of Bahamas Marinas, whose members, like most Bahamians, were blindsided by the sudden appearance of barges installing helix anchors and floating balls. “Insane,” one of Maury’s colleagues quipped.
The moorings are still in place. Waiting for new management?
The lease assigning control of more than 4,000 acres of seabed to a single company granted Bahamas Moorings Ltd. the right to provide mooring services “in the Exuma and elsewhere in the country.” Would the Abacos and Eleuthera have been next?
As it happens, the Bahamas are home to an astounding 40 percent of the world’s seagrass beds, which sequester huge amounts of carbon on the seafloor, according to scientists. The moorings appeared to have been cover to exercise control over a carbon offset to be sold to industries unable to reduce their carbon footprint on their own.
Mooring fields at popular Normans Cay.
Boaters Blamed
In response to Loose Cannon’s back-to-back articles on the moorings controversy (but before the project was canceled), the Bahamas government issued a news release, which said the quiet part out loud: “This initiative is also a key component of the Bahamas Blue Carbon Project, which aims to generate funding through carbon credit sales linked to the protection of seagrass beds and marine sediment—critical natural carbon sinks.”
The same release blamed you, the cruising public, for damaging seagrass beds:
For years, unregulated anchoring has significantly damaged coral reefs and seagrass beds—critical marine habitats supporting biodiversity and carbon sequestration. Recent research by Beneath the Waves, a leading marine science organisation, has documented a 20-30 percent decline in seagrass coverage in parts of the Exuma Cays over the past decade, underscoring the urgent need for action. Installing these moorings will help preserve marine ecosystems while enhancing navigational safety by reducing anchor-related destruction and minimising seabed disturbance.
But experts contradicted the government, saying many, if not most of the planned mooring fields have sandy bottoms entirely without reefs or grasses. A prime example—where mooring installation was underway until the cease and desist order—is the anchorage at Big Major Cay, famous for good holding and swimming pigs.
“The initial mooring balls in Normans Cay, Big Majors and Black Point are installed in some of the best holding clear sand in Exuma. There are bits of grass around, but nothing that even remotely resembles a nursery environment,” said Addison Chan, author of the Bahamas Land & Sea appand its corresponding Facebook group.
“I haven’t studied every chart in detail, but my sense is the leases cover the best anchorages in the Bahamas, which tend to be areas that are currently free of grass. Take for example the areas around Compass Cay, an area that is difficult to anchor because of shallow water and grassy flats, the leased lands cover the viable areas of clear sand. In fact, the area that falls within Pipe Creek appears to be shaped by the clear sand area.”
Loose Cannon interviewed a Bahamian naturalist who asked not to be named for fear of retribution. Familiar with the cays in question, this person confirmed that many of the anchorages are entirely sand. “Grass ain’t everywhere they claim, so they ain’t saving no seagrass,” the naturalist said, rebutting to the government’s defense of the project.
As far as potential for moorings to aid in seagrass restoration, it would likely happen only in places where grass beds had been historically. “Just putting moorings in pure sand doesn’t generate growth of seagrass, if it wasn’t there before,” the person said.
Sand not grass. This is a photo of the large central mooring area noted on the Big Major chart. The bottom is nearly all sand, as anyone who has visited the swimming pigs can attest.
And what about the proposal that cruisers could choose to anchor as long as they were willing to pay 55 cents or $1.10 per foot, depending on LOA? Critics back in February said that if saving the seabeed were really the motivation, anchoring would be banned altogether. Today, the new fee structure monetizes the practice by charging cruisers who wish to avoid marinas a $300 anchoring fee.
A bill of lading obtained by Loose Cannon described the Bahamas Moorings order for Chinese-made helical screw anchors as being accompanied by 38 and 25mm open-link chain. While moorings employ significantly less scope than anchoring, an all-rope mooring rode would be even less damaging than a rope-chain setup that this document suggests.
A photo taken by a cruiser shows one new mooring attached not to a helical screw but a big conventional anchor and chain.
Big anchor, not a helical screw. Oddly, this sketchy set-up was intended for bigger yachts.
Greenwashing
So, how did the question of seagrass fit in the moorings/blue carbon narrative? The government says moorings will protect seagrass. Experts say there tends not to be seagrass where moorings were actually placed.
Maybe, what was being sold is just the belief that mooring fields will protect Bahamas seagrass. The term for this is greenwashing.
Cohn, Cohn & Colapinto, a U.S. law firm that specializes in defending whistleblowers, notes that carbon-offset scams often share the following characteristics:
Overstated impact: some projects may exaggerate the amount of carbon they can offset, leading to misleading claims.
Lack of transparency: scammers may avoid providing clear information about their projects, making it difficult to verify their claims.
Weak verification processes: some projects may rely on inadequate verification processes, allowing for fraudulent activities to go undetected.
Greenwashing: the use of misleading marketing tactics a company uses to portray themselves as environmentally responsible, even if their carbon offset claims are unfounded.
Will Cruisers Quit Coming?
The Tribune reporter also quoted Eric Carey, the ex-Bahamas National Trust (BNT) executive director, who worried that having to pay for moorings and/or anchoring may create a tipping point in the cruising community. What he said might well apply to today’s entry-fee controversy:
A very careful assessment needs to be done of the carrying capacity of what boaters are willing to pay before boaters abandon The Bahamas because of what they can’t afford. It can’t be a licence to print money and boaters say, we’ll abandon The Bahamas. I’ve spoken to people at Black Point, Staniel Cay who have restaurants. They say that if those boats abandon us because they’re forced out, they’ll be severely impacted.
What Carey may have been too polite to say is that cruisers as a whole are a parsimonious lot. Groceries, liquor and fuel are already 30 percent higher in the Bahamas compared to the U.S. Dockage is very expensive, too. Recently, Bahamian officials have been enforcing immigration rules in capricious and arbitrary ways, stressing out many mom-and-pop cruisers.
Free anchoring has been the spoonful of sugar that helped the medicine go down. Without it, the Bahamas marine industry fears the worst. Surely, the principals of Bahamas Moorings and their eco-affiliates had to have been aware that their overt business might have failed simply because cruisers wouldn’t participate.
Maybe, thatnew$300 anchoring fee is intended as an incentive to use those leftover moorings once a new administrative structure is in place.
The lead story in the May 1 Guardian newspaper described how the prime minister was “pushing ahead with its efforts to monetize blue carbon credits through a new agreement with a Chicago based company.” A government news release described how Carbon Management Limited (CML), a Bahamian-controlled public-private partnership, will turn seaweed into cash:
Using Laconic’s innovative Sovereign Carbon Security, which does not require a sovereign guarantee, the program will see verified, additional and real carbon removals generated by the CML’s scientific management of up to 150,000 square kilometers of the nation’s seagrass ecosystems monetized over the next five years in full compliance with Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement,
The question is: How might this lucrative scheme be related to the new fee structure? The timing, of course, could be nothing more than coincidence. Come forward, Bahamas sources, and enlighten us. Tell us about those “real carbon removals.”
Stand by for more reporting on the fees, moorings and other shennanigans happening in our favorite island nation. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day.
LOOSE CANNON covers hard news, technical issues and nautical history. Every so often he tries to be funny. Subscribe for free to support the work. If you’ve been reading for a while—and you like it—consider upgrading to paid.
Cruisers Net publishes Loose Cannon articles with Captain Swanson’s permission in hopes that mariners with salt water in their veins will subscribe. $7 a month or $56 for the year, and you may cancel at any time.
The 50th anniversary of the movie Jaws is being widely commemorated because of the film’s cinematic, cultural and social influence. It is being marked by television specials and multiple events around where the movie was filmed, which is also where the fictional events were to have happened.
I was 20 when “Jaws” came to the Buzzards Bay Theater in 1975. My hometown of Wareham was just around the corner from the island of Martha’s Vineyard where Jaws was filmed.¹ I had spent the past dozen years swimming in local waters and sailing our Cape Dory sailboats²—almost daily all summer long.
Wareham has more miles of beachfront than any other town in Massachusetts—54 miles compared to about 125 for the entire island of Marthas Vineyard.
I never, ever saw a single shark off any beach. Not a single shark while underway on Buzzards Bay or Cape Cod Bay. I never saw a shark when I sailed to “the Vineyard.” I never heard talk about anyone seeing one either.
The closest thing were the dogfish we’d catch while fishing offshore for cod. When we were stupid enough not to throw them overboard, the darn things would give birth to live little sharks as they lay dying in the cockpit of a cabin cruiser. ³
Point being: Jaws may have been a scary monster movie, but it was as remote as Godzilla from actual experience in our corner of New England. Sharks were not a thing back then, but the movie took a psychological toll nonetheless.
Our connection to Hollywood.
My uncle Jack Carlson had been an early adopter of SCUBA diving during the 1950s and 60s, when they were still developing the technology we use today. Uncle Jack was good at it. He got regular calls from police asking him to retrieve the corpses of folks who had fallen through pond ice and drowned.
He also had a recreational license to dive for lobster in Massachusetts waters. At some point, he did a 90-foot free-dive at a drop-off near Provincetown after reading about Polynesian pearl divers doing so.
Jack was as lean and fit as ever when I asked him how the diving was going. “I quit,” he said. “Ever since Jaws, I couldn’t enjoy it anymore.”
A great white shark was swimming inside Jack’s brain—dun-dun, dun-dun—even though the animals themselves were absent. Galeophobia is the clinical term for a fear of sharks, and my uncle was exhibiting the symptoms.
Origins
The Jaws story, as written in the Peter Benchley novel, had its origins in a series of 1916 shark attacks in New Jersey and a real-life shark-murdering guy named Frank Mundus who fished out of Montauk on Long Island. Mundus is widely believed to have inspired the Quint character in the novel and movie.
Four swimmers were killed and another critically hurt in the Jersey Shore attacks, though it is just as likely that a bull shark was responsible, not a great white.⁴
Food Source
Just 18 years before the New Jersey attacks, Massachusetts and Maine had begun encouraging the killing of seals, through a bounty system. Fishermen argued that seals were stealing their livelihood, which was true in a way. Lobstermen were even convinced that seals were opening their traps to eat the bait and catch.
The solution was a shotgun loaded with deer slugs. At town hall, you could trade a sliced-off seal snout for ten bucks. (By comparison, crows’ feet only got you a nickle.)
According to researchers, 135,000 harbor and grey seals had been killed under the bounty system by the end of the 1960s. Then, the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 outlawed seal killing altogether. The seals gradually repopulated.
By the 1990s I was using a long lens and a tripod to try to get photos for my newspaper showing small seal colonies sunning themselves on rocks at the mouth of the Merrimack River.
The mechanical great white in Jaws was all alone in 1975 because real sharks stayed away. There were no seals to eat. When the seals did come back—New England now has an estimated 100,000 harbor and grey seals—so did the great whites.
There’s irony in that. Scientists have estimated that there have been up to 800 individual great whites in Cape Cod waters over a recent four-year period.
If the great white shark were as malevolent as Benchley and Jaws diretor Steven Spielberg had portrayed, the species would be chowing down on tourists like they were shrimp in a wedding buffet.
The mechanical shark was scary enough, but didn’t work very well, so director Spielberg relied on the soundtrack to create tension: “dun-dun, dun-dun.”
Jaws Moments
In 2018, Massachusetts finally had a couple events right out of the Jaws script. Two great white attacks happened in Cape Cod waters, one of which was fatal. Arthur Medici died while surfing off Wellfleet on the “Outer Cape.”
Writing in a May 14, 2019 story for Boston magazine, writer Casey Sherman described the event in gruesome detail:
Fellow surfers saw a giant eruption of water, followed by the sight of a shark thrashing and whipping its tail back and forth around Medici’s body. Before Rocha could think, his arms and legs began churning furiously toward Medici, closing the distance with each stroke. “Arthur! Come to me, come to me!” he shouted, swallowing and spitting out mouthfuls of bloody saltwater. “You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.”
Medici did not respond, floating motionless atop a small wave. When Rocha finally reached him, Medici was unconscious with his head face-down in the water. The Everett High student and commander of his school’s junior ROTC class instantly remembered his rescue training, getting behind Medici, placing both hands under Medici’s armpits, and swimming several more yards until his feet touched the sand. Rocha used his remaining strength to drag his friend onto the beach.
“Shark! Shark! Shark!” he gasped. “Get people out of the water!”
Predictably, there were some calls to kill sharks or kill seals, or both, to save Cape Cod’s all-important tourist industry. Calls for “lethal management”⁵ of sharks has its own sociology term. It’s called the “Jaws Effect.”
Besides Jaws’ own sequels, Hollywood made copycat films such as Barracuda and Orca. Both creatures were a lot bigger than the real thing.
In Massachusetts, however, the official response to shark attacks was very un-Jaws-like. Public attitudes toward sharks had evolved quite a bit over the past four decades. Even shark tournaments down in Montauk are catch-and-release now. Lethal shark-fishing contests, which had thrived post-Jaws in the spirit of revenge,⁶ have come under increasing fire by the ecology-minded and animal-rights crowds.
As for killing seals, well, they are just too darned cute. (Unless you fish for a living, then they are not cute at all.)⁷ Here’s what the 2021 study “Human Dimensions of Rebounding Seal and Shark Populations on Cape Cod” said:
Voters and especially tourists view seals favorably. They hope to see them on Cape Cod. They largely perceive seals as beneficial, positive and enjoyable. They believe that seals are an important part of the marine ecosystem and a sign of a healthy environment. Commercial fishers hold different views and are more negative in their perceptions of seals and their ecological, economic and fishery impacts. Commercial fishers blame seals for reducing and suppressing fish stocks, hurting the economy and creating public safety risks by attracting sharks to the area.
Sharks are scary but also get a pass, according to the study:
While sharks generate fear and are viewed as a threat to people by the majority of voters, tourists and commercial fishers, the perceived benefits of sharks appear to outweigh the risks. Respondents in all three stakeholder groups view sharks as important to the marine ecosystem. By large margins, respondents in all groups agree with the statement, “I am willing to accept some inconvenience and risk in order to have oceans where marine wildlife can thrive.”
Survey Results, Sharks & Seals
Unlike the folks of fictional Amity, hardly anyone nowadays is blaming the shark. Only a small percentage of people in the three groups surveyed said they thought shark bites were intentional. About 90 percent said sharks bite people by accident.
So, instead of recruiting a 2025 version of Quint, Bay State authorities are relying on signage, lifeguard training, beach patrols, shark-alert systems and public education. (For example, don’t hang out in the water with a bunch of seals, no matter how cute they may be.)
What else helps keep casualties down: 46 percent of tourists surveyed said they won’t go in the water. What’s that word again?
Galeophobia. (Dun-dun, dun-dun.)
LOOSE CANNON covers hard news, technical issues and nautical history. Every so often he tries to be funny. Subscribe for free to support the work. If you’ve been reading for a while—and you like it—consider upgrading to paid.
The movie was filmed in Vineyard Haven, Menemsha, Chilmark and Edgartown, but mostly in Edgartown. So fictional Amity is most likely based on Edgartown.
2
I’m talking about the earliest Cape Dories, the actual 10 and 12-footers and the 16-foot Handi-Cat, a beefed up version of the traditional Beetle Cat design.
3
In the 1980s, an industry was established that sent frozen filets of dogfish (aka sand sharks, perhaps incorrectly) over to Britain for fish and chips. But we had no notion of how to make them edible ourselves.
4
Researchers say warm-water shark species such as bulls are expanding their range northward because of warming ocean temperatures. They are expected to join their great white cousins in New England waters in the near future.
5
Think “humanely euthanized.” For example, tickling your target to death.
6
Jaws Director Steven Spielberg, 78, has expressed remorse over Jaws—even though it established his status as a talented director, while he was still in his 20s. “I regret the decimation of the shark population because of the book and film,” he told the BBC in 2022. “I truly and to this day regret that.”
7
Back in the day, I had always attributed the notion of seals breaking into traps as typical lobsterman bluster, but sure enough contemporary accounts and even a YouTube video make the case pretty convincingly.
Cruisers Net publishes Loose Cannon articles with Captain Swanson’s permission in hopes that mariners with salt water in their veins will subscribe. $7 a month or $56 for the year, and you may cancel at any time.
Bahamian legislators have amended proposed cruising fee increases to go easier on the average visiting sailboat and trawler. Instead of $1,650, a cruiser who fishes and anchors would pay $1,150.
Lawmakers have done this by adjusting the catagories. Previously there were three catagories: up to 34 feet, 35 to 100 feet and over 100 feet. Now the catagories are up to 50 feet, over 50 to 100 feet and over 100 feet.
So instead of paying $1,000 for entry on your average 44-foot sailboat, the cruising permit will cost $500 feet. The proposed anchoring fee remains at $200 or $350, depending on whether up to or over 34 feet. The proposed fishing permit also remains at $200 or $350 depending of whether up to or over 34 feet. The fishing permit is valid for two entries within 30 days.
The anchoring fees for vessels over 100 feet is $1,500.
Facebook has been ablaze with indignation ever since the foreign cruising community learned about the bill. The center-console crowd was also angered, but they too got some relief in the latest version.
The frequent digital cruising card (FDCC), which caters to the long-weekend visitors boating over from South Florida, now costs $1,500 for vessels up to 50 feet and is good for two years of unlimited travel. Boats over 50 and up to 100 feet will cost $2,500 and those over 100 will cost $8,000.
Echoing the Bahamas Prime Minister’s own anti-American boater rhetoric, much of the Bahamian response on social media was a collective “good ridance, you cheapskates,” accusing foreigners of taking their fish, polluting their waters with sewage and messing up the seabed with our anchors.
But those sentiments were not shared by people in the marine industry such as Stephen Kappeler of the Bimini Big Game Club Resort and Marina, who told a reporter from the Tribune newspaper of Nassau that he had fielded 12 cancelations that day and expected the trend to continue. Kappeler said:
Remember, when we cancel a booking, this is money that somebody’s already paid, a deposit they’ve already paid. When you book a room and you book a slip with us, that’s somewhere in the area of $500 in business just the first night deposit. And guests are coming in for two, three, four nights.
So you could multiply and extend that out to understand what the value of a cancellation is. And they’re looking for the refund of their money. I can tell you, there were a dozen alone today. We’re a 50-room resort. So if this continues at a pace of a dozen a day… I’m sure not everybody’s got the news or got the message. So this thing is going to be exponential.
That was yesterday. The Tribune tends to be less friendly to the ruling party than the Bahamas other major newspaper, and today it published another story on the issue that began with this:
The Bahamian tourism industry and its three main promotion boards have untied to urge the Prime Minister to “pause” new and increased boating fees that “could not have come at a worse time.”
In their joint letter to the PM, The Bahamas Hotel and Tourism Association, the Bahamas Out Islands Promotions Board, the Nassau/Paradise Island Promotions Board and the Grand Bahama Island Promotion Board described a “high spending, buoyant, seafaring visitor market. who contribute significantly to a vast number of tourism business owners…throughout the archipelago.”
The promotion boards cited reports of numerous marina cancellations. They noted that the nation’s tourism industry was facing uncertain times and that while the cruise-ship sector appeared to have a solid footing, the rest of the industry “faces far less predictable, precarious headwinds.”
There has been no pause—at least not yet—but Attorney General Ryan Pinder spoke to the Bahamas Senate Tuesday, arguing that the new version of the bill strikes “an appropriate balance” that raises fees but also extends the duration of a cruising permit from three months to a year.
LOOSE CANNON covers hard news, technical issues and nautical history. Every so often he tries to be funny. Subscribe for free to support the work. If you’ve been reading for a while—and you like it—consider upgrading to paid.
An on-the-water retirement home or vacation home for those who love the rich cultural ports-of-call cruising waters of North Carolina, Albemarle Plantation Marina, a port on the Albemarle Loop and a CRUISERS NET SPONSOR, is located just off the AICW on the northern shores of Albemarle Sound on Yeopim River/Creek.
Exploring the Albemarle Queen: A Journey Through Time and Water
Nestled in the scenic coastal region of North Carolina, the Albemarle Queen Paddlewheel offers an enchanting escape for locals and visitors alike. As you glide along the tranquil waters of the Albemarle Sound, you’re not just enjoying a boat ride—you’re embarking on a remarkable journey steeped in history, culture, and natural beauty.
A Glimpse into History
The Albemarle Queen is more than just a boat; it’s a floating piece of history. Originally designed to evoke the classic paddlewheel boats of the 19th century, she has captured the charm and elegance of a bygone era. The vessel serves as a tribute to the rich maritime heritage that has shaped the region.
When you step aboard, you’re greeted by the breathtaking craftsmanship of the boat—its polished wood finishes, ornate columns, and intricate details call to mind a time when river travel was considered the height of luxury. The humming of the paddlewheel and the gentle ripple of water beneath the boat create an atmosphere that is both nostalgic and serene.
The Scenic Journey
As the Albemarle Queen sets sail from her dock, passengers are immediately immersed in the stunning scenery surrounding them. Towering cypress trees, lush marshlands, and the shimmering waters of the sound create a picturesque backdrop that changes with the sun’s descent. The deck offers panoramic views that invite photographers and nature lovers to capture the moment.
Cruising along the waterways, you might catch sight of local wildlife—from playful dolphins to graceful herons—as they thrive in their natural habitat. The soothing sounds of nature intermingle with the soft swell of the paddlewheel, transporting guests to a peaceful state of mind, far removed from the hustle and bustle of daily life.
The Heartbeat of the Sound
Every journey on the Albemarle Queen is infused with the stories of the region. From local legends to historical anecdotes shared by the knowledgeable crew, guests dive deeper into the intricate tapestry of the Albemarle region. The onboard guides share tales of early explorers, native tribes, and the evolution of trade routes that traversed these waters long ago.
In a time when urban life often overshadows the beauty of nature, the Albemarle Queen reminds us of the invaluable connection between people and the environment. The paddlewheel travails echo the experiences of countless souls who relied on these waters for sustenance and adventure.
Events and Entertainment
The Albemarle Queen is not just a transportation vessel; it’s a venue for unforgettable experiences. With themed cruises, dinner outings, and special events throughout the summer, there’s always something happening on board. Whether it’s a romantic dinner cruise featuring local seafood delicacies or a lively music evening with regional bands, the boat offers a diverse array of activities to suit all tastes.
Families can also enjoy special cruises designed for children, complete with engaging educational activities that bring the stories of the sound to life. From pirate-themed adventures to nature workshops, the Albemarle Queen fosters a love for the water in the hearts of younger generations.
Whether you’re a local resident looking for a unique experience or a visitor seeking to uncover the charm of North Carolina’s coast, a trip on the Albemarle Queen Paddlewheel is an experience you won’t forget. With its rich history, breathtaking scenery, and entertaining events, this floating treasure offers an escape into the heart of the Albemarle region.
As the sun sets over the horizon, casting a golden glow on the water, you’ll find yourself grateful for the memories made aboard the Albemarle Queen—an unforgettable blend of past and present, nature and culture, adventure and tranquility. So grab your hat, your friends, and be ready to set sail into a world where history comes alive and every ripple tells a story.
Book your trip on the Albemarle Queen – Learn More
Cruisers Net publishes Loose Cannon articles with Captain Swanson’s permission in hopes that mariners with salt water in their veins will subscribe. $7 a month or $56 for the year, and you may cancel at any time.
Panamanian troops clear a roadblock on a coastal highway.
Did you know there is rioting in Panama? Neither did I. Because it hasn’t been reported outside the country. I learned of the unrest and violence only because Noonsite—an online information source for international cruisers—recently broke the story.
It’s always been a good idea to hire an agent to transit the Panama Canal. Erick Galvez of Centenairio & Company is an agent who specializes in recreational vessels, as opposed to commercial shipping. Galvez was the source for Noonsite’s warning about Panama, published a couple weeks ago:
For the moment, yachts should avoid stopping in San Blas to check or check out. There are no authorities and they are saying their are breaking relationships with the central government. San Blas is an Indian eservationarea. Another Indian reservation in Bocas del Toro has vandalized the Port Authority office in Almirante, Bocas del Toro, and roads are being blocked to Bocas. I would say avoid visiting San Blas until the situation is back to normal, and avoid mainland travel in Bocas del Toro.
Two of the affected regions happen to be cruising destinations.
Galvez said the warning still applies, although the Panamanian goverment is engaged in talks with the strikers.
The indigenous peoples of Panama and the rural poor in general are angry at a new law passed by the legislature in March. The law changes the Panama social security system from one which uses contributions from working people to subsidize pensions of retirees to an individual account scheme. Protesters say this is a form of privatization that will lead to “starvation pensions.”
Bocas del Toro is an archipelago that has attracted it’s own expat cruising community. The region which includes the islands has been particularly active against the government. On the mainland, the resistance has blocked roads, attacked goverment offices and even kidnapped a tourist.
Islanders Under Pressure
The San Blas Islands with its self-sustaining indigenous islanders is considered one of the finest Caribbean destinations. The San Blas archipelago—which calls itself Guna Yala—recently issued a defiant proclamation reminding the central government that its people had once engaged in an armed rebellion back in 1925, and they just might do it again.
This is how the Guna leadership began it’s June 3 declaration:
Our country is currently under threat under a dictatorship. Our leaders are currently being persecuted, criminalized, and threatened. Our communities are being indiscriminately harassed, overpowered, and massacred by the police force under the orders of President José Raúl Mulino. Therefore, the Gunadule people of the Gunayala region repudiate and denounce before the country and the world the vile and cowardly abuse of the indigenous population of Panama, violating all national and international law and the norms that protect the rights of indigenous peoples.
The Guna have shut down Panamanian goverment offices, so even if cruising vessels were to arrive on its main island, they could not clear in.
The Guna people are known for their colorful needlework, which is a mainstay of their subsistence economy.
There are more than 360 islands in the San Blas archipelago, 49 of which are populated. In its account of the crisis, Noonsite has reminded readers that the Guna people have been under stress because a rising sea is reducing the number of their islands one by one. In 2024, about 300 Guna families from the island of Garid Sugdub had to be relocated to the mainland.
“Every time I do a survey…I have to take islands off the maps that are now nothing but shoals,” wrote Eric Bauhaus, author of The Panama Cruising Guide.
Bocas a ‘Cruiser Haven’
Bocas de Toros has coagulated into more of an expat community along the lines of Grenada and Luperon in the Dominican Republic, or what author Ray Jason calls “cruiser havens.” Here’s what Jason wrote in 2013:
Located on the Caribbean coast of Panama near the Costa Rican border, this unspoiled archipelago of nine big islands and many smaller ones creates an inland sea where the breezes are so tranquil the waves rarely exceed knee height. And because Panama is south of the hurricane zone, there is no “season.” You can safely cruise here all year round…
There are over 100 anchorages here: most completely empty, none completely full and absolutely zero with pay-to-stay moorings. From the water, layers of breathtaking hills, mountains and volcanoes are visible in the background. In the foreground, exotic toucans, sloths and parrots live amidst the bananas, cacao and bamboo. Truly, it is other-worldly.
The locals are a friendly mix of Latin, Indio and Caribbean that blend seamlessly with visiting sailors, backpackers and surfers, none of whom you’d find at your local mall. There is also a sizable group of ex-cruisers who were so dazzled by this unspoiled water world when they first arrived that they now live in homes along the shore.
The Bocas Marina is on the island of Bocas del Toro.
Now, the dockmaster recommends that people with boats at the Bocas Marina stay stay put and avoid the chaos of blocked roads on the mainland. Fabiano Pereira quoted the Bocas Breeze, a local news outlet:
After four days of Operation Omega, 22 roadblocks have been opened and another 22 points remain closed, with one partially open, according to last evening’s press conference with Vice Minister of Public Security, Luis Felipe Icaza…
So far there have been 48 people apprehended and one fatality. Yesterday a protester was found lying on the road in Rambala (Chiriqui Grande). He was given first aid and then taken to a hospital, where his death was confirmed. Local residents say he was hit by a bullet.
The Breeze then quoted a foreign woman who made it from the islands to the Costa Rican border by a somewhat circuitous route:
I made it to the mainland today. It is safe to go. I went with Torres water taxi. The fares however are not cheap. And they go through the Changuinola river. They stop at Finca 44, avoiding Changuinola center and Almirante’s protests. Upon arrival, there are mini buses waiting there for visitors to go to the border. No roads blocked as for today. Who knows tomorrow.
A Final Word
The final word on security comes from Erick Galvez, who says:
As mentioned in Galvez’ audio, Guna people have their own set of rules for foreigners.
LOOSE CANNON covers hard news, technical issues and nautical history. Every so often he tries to be funny. Subscribe for free to support the work. If you’ve been reading for a while—and you like it—consider upgrading to paid.
Cruisers Net publishes Loose Cannon articles with Captain Swanson’s permission in hopes that mariners with salt water in their veins will subscribe. $7 a month or $56 for the year, and you may cancel at any time.
“Speed is useless without control. Better to build a slower boat with more usable speed.” —Valentine Jenkins, leading figure from “Thunderboat Row.”
In this screenshot from YouTube video that went viral, a Fountain 38 yaws violently during a 2012 “poker run” event on Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri. You can watch the video at the end of the story. Another Fountain 38 was at the center of a lawsuit regarding its stepped hull after a 2003 accident on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire.
Val Jenkins was vice-president for manufacturing at Cigarette, a legendary go-fast company serving racing and consumer markets. Throughout his career, Jenkins refused to build stepped-hull boats for Cigarette’s civilian customers, whom he described as “dentists, doctors and owners of dry cleaners.”
These amateurs were just not serious enough. Their notion of boating was “go fast, look good, get laid,” Jenkins said.
Stepped hulls have tremendous appeal because they make fast boats go even faster without adding horse power. The trade-off has been that many, if not most models can become unstable when turning.
The existence of that deadly flaw was kept quiet in the early days of center-console adoption, according to an industry insider who will be quoted later in the story.
With a handful of notable exceptions, the story of the stepped-hull design is a story about an industry that made a deal with the Devil. The money was good, even as the body-count rose and continues to do so. The cruel irony has been that the dead have often been the bikini-clad companions, not the operators themselves, as the latter survived by clinging tight to the wheel during 65 mph spinouts and rollovers.
At this point, regular readers might be saying, “So what? I’ve got a sailboat, or I’ve got a trawler. We all know the go-fast crowd are a bunch of knuckleheads. Who cares?”
Recent stories about the Bayesian disaster, the loss of the first Pride of Baltimore and a hybrid jetski-pontoon boat that will flip over forward during deceleration weren’t exactly “on market” either, but taken together with this account, they begin to paint a picture.
Boats with design flaws are like mirror-world slot machines. When a certain malign combination of symbols finally displays—call ’em the circumstances—the unwitting players become the opposite of rewarded, whether billionaires on a yacht or a family tooling around Pontoon Lake.
Quad powered, 1800-horsepower Fuel Me Up was going 77 mph when she yawed and rolled. One man died.
Recent Fatalities
November 9, 2024: Eytan Genoune, 22, was killed when the Nor-Tech 34 in which he was riding made “an unexpected sudden turn” while traveling southbound on the Intracoastal Waterway near Miami. The turn was violent enough to break off the boat’s T-top and eject all three people on board.
November 7, 2024: Stephanie Rodriguez, 24, was killed when the Deep Impact Custom 39 in which she was riding, spun out ejecting six of eight occupants after the operator made a turn to starboard. The boat had been traveling from Miami to Key West in a “poker run” event.
September 26, 2023: Michael Garcia, 41, was killed on Biscayne Bay when Fuel Me Up, the Contender 39 in which he was riding “yawed to starboard and rolled multiple times to port,” ejecting the three men onboard. Garcia was interested in buying the boat, and this was a seatrial. He was at the helm.
All the quoted information above comes from Florida Fish & Wildlife investigation reports. Investigators made no mention of drugs or alcohol being a factor. Each vessel is a center-console with a stepped hull.
Contender is a major American boatbuilder. Loose Cannon emailed the company for comment on the Garcia fatality, referencing Val Jenkins’ position on stepped hulls. There has been no reply.
How They Work
Those two notches toward the aft end of the boat are the edges of the steps that run transversely across the bottom to the other side. This boat happens to have been built by SeaVee, one of a handful of manufacturers who have cracked the code on how to make this hull design safer for an average boater.
The “steps” molded into a planing hull act as ventilation tunnels, which means they draw air down below the surface of the water. The roiling mix of air and water reduces the friction in the area of the hull behind the step. Reducing friction increases speed and makes for better gas mileage.
The boat’s pivot point, the base of the transom on a conventional deep-V hull, now resides at the step instead, helping to reduce pitching and reduce bow angle, which industry people call the angle of attack. Running flatter means you can see the horizon over the bow.
At this point, Michael Peters should be introduced. He is the naval architect most associated with stepped-hull technology. His first time in a stepped-hull speedboat was with his wife. Peters rolled it and almost killed them both. He went on to develop a stepped-hull safe enough to have been adopted for U.S. Navy fast-attack craft.
Writing in the November 2010 issue of Professional Boatbuilder magazine, Peters highlighted how dangerous unrefined stepped hulls could be compared to conventional deep-V hulls:
A speed, a conventional deep-V runs with its lateral area aft. And, when trimmed in for a turn, the boat adds lateral area and carves a nice, controllable turn. A stepped hull, however, behaves differently. At speed, the wetted surface and lateral area have gaps caused by the steps. The water under the bottom, aft of the steps, is actually an air-and-water mix—there are bubbles—making for very little resistance and a very fast bottom. So when you turn the boat, if you trim in (as with a conventional deep-V), you plant the bow and move all the lateral area forward, with nothing but bubbles—a wetted surface that behaves more like ballbearings…As far as the boat is concerned, there is no drive aft. And therefore no resistance to spinning out and rolling…
We’ve since learned that every manufacturer of stepped hulls has had the same thing happen. Repeatedly. It is the best-kept secret out there.
Hushed-Up
That last paragraph is intriguing. In the early years of the millennia, boatbuilders were taking step-hull technology from the racing teams—whose throttlemen were strapped in and wore helmets—and applying it to center-consoles, which were family and recreational fishing craft.
What Peters was saying, and what he repeated in an interview with Loose Cannon, was that the entire marine industry knew stepped hulls were deadly. Professional Boatbuilder covered the history and proliferation of stepped hulls most thoroughly, but ordinary consumers did not subscribe to Probo, as it was called. It wasn’t on the magazine stands at airports.
The enthusiast magazines—publications read by ordinary boaters—kept quiet about the issue even though stepped hulls were becoming central to a growing number of personal-injury and wrongful-death lawsuits. And, even though, according to Peters, a stepped-hull boat on seatrial actually rolled with bunch of magazine writers aboard!
Not a word was written, presumably because a potential advertiser was involved. By March 2014 Soundings—the newsiest of the boating magazines—was writing about the stepped-hull trend, and although the story buried the lead (as editors like to say), it did include a couple oblique references to the carnage.
“In a sense it’s like going from Army boots to ballet toe shoes. In the boots you can move around a lot and not fall over, but in the toe shoes you had better put some thought into your movements or risk an accident.”—Naval Architect Richard Akers, writing in Professional Boatbuilder magazine.
A quarter century has passed since the early stepped hulls were introduced to recreational craft and a decade since Soundings leaked its grain of truth. Today, the center-console market is booming in harmony with the near perfection of the outboard motor.
Jenkins and other experts interviewed for this article argue that the behavior of unrefined stepped hulls is too unpredictable for your average weekend boater to master. Going back to the slot-machine analogy, there are several factors on a continuum that are always combining to affect performance as their values change: Speed, trim angle, sea state, weight (fuel in tanks), weight distribution, rate of turn, etc. The number of possible combinations is mind-boggling.
Refinements
Some builders are selling stepped-hull boats that aren’t much improved at all. Others have steadfastly refused to put steps in their hulls, saying their boats were fast enough already. Time has normalized the idea of steps even though the accidents continue.
Some of these stepped-hull boats are much better than they used to be, however. As mentioned, Michael Peters came up with an innovation that largely prevented his stepped-hull designs from spinning out, though he will remind you that spinouts are never impossible given the high speeds involved.
Peter’s refinement was to add another indented section running longitudinally connecting the aftmost step to an opening at the transom. This shallow box-like indentation was inspired by the racing powercat pontoon architecture. This “tunnel” presented just enough lateral area “to catch the hull, but not so abruptly that it will trip it,” Peters told Soundings.
Peters’ innovation. If you want to understand the lingo: Longitudinally means something is laid out fore-and-aft. Transverse means something is laid out from side to side, as is the case with the actual steps. The tunnel is said to be longitudinal.
Peters is not a boatbuilder. He founded Michael Peters Yacht Design of Sarasota, Florida in 1981, specializing in high-speed watercraft. Peters designs boats for builders and governments. He won’t license his patented stepped hull to third parties.
His stepped-hull designs are sold by several center-console brands, including Invincible, Blackfin, Valhalla, Barker, Mag Bay and Caymas.
(According to Peters, Contender asked him to design its first stepped hulls, but a contract with a competing builder precluded him from doing so. Had things gone differently, Michael Garcia might be alive today and tooling around Biscayne Bay in a newly purchased Contender 39.)
The U.S. Navy’s Special Warfare Command contracted Peters to draw the lines for its MK VI Patrol Boat, a 61-foot stepped-hull design. Yes, Navy Seals ride into combat on a Peters hull, considered too valuable to die in a boating accident before they can get to the fight. (This story is part of an Invincible Boats YouTube video at bottom.)
Stepped-hull designers Robert Kaidy (left) and Michael Peters.
SeaVee
SeaVee has been building center-consoles in South Florida since 1974. At around the same time that Peters was working toward his ventillated tunnel refinement, SeaVee decided to come up with its own solution and hired a naval architect named Robert Kaidy as vice-president of engineering.
Where Peters’ solution had been to incorporate an “inny” feature, Kaidy found similar results from an “outy.” That is, a series of strakes, which SeaVee dubbed a “Speedrail.” Thus, declared SeaVee, the stepped-hull was “perfected.”
The SeaVee patent illustration describes its “Speedrail” as strakes labeled 78B & C, 80B & C and 82 B & C.
According to SeaVee, its Speedrail “creates a vertical positive pressure surfaces that does not allow the boat to ‘slip out’ at right speeds or going into a turn.” AI wasn’t a thing 12 years ago, when SeaVee applied for its patent, but there was such a thing as computer modeling. SeaVee went further, as shown below.
A plug is a hull-prototype used by boatbuilders to create the female hull mold (any mold really). SeaVee set out to test the design by reinforcing the plug, powering it and going out on seatrials.
At the time, SeaVee produced a marketing video documenting the company’s philosophy and the design process that produced it’s Z Series line of stepped-hull center-consoles, which you can watch below.
Armchair experts may view both of these refinements as obvious. As Peters pointed out, however, the history of invention is full of products or methods that, while obvious in hindsight, represented a huge investment in time, money and human energy during development—in his case, an entire career.
The fact that both solutions are patented means that any other builder who wants to refine its stepped hull to make it safer has to come up with something distinct from the Peters tunnel or the Kaidy strakes.
Or that builder can wait until the patents expire.
SeaVee’s Speedrail patent does not expire until 2034, but the expiration for one of the Peters stepped-hull patents is just around the corner—July 1, 2028. Loose Cannon asked Peters to channel his inner Gandhi. Would he consider releasing his patent for general use early, you know, for the public good? He chuckled and said something about “un-American.”
Illustrator Douglas Coffin caught the spirit of the stepped-hull’s appeal in this cartoon published in Professional Boatbuilder magazine back in the early days of its introduction to a mass market. (Reproduced with permission)
Training
The U.S. Coast Guard does not have standards for center-console hull designs. The International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, has language on hull construction but not design. The American Boat & Yacht Council, or ABYC, sets standards for many facets of boat construction, but not hull design.
The courts have been handling lawsuits over stepped hulls ever since their introduction into center-consoles, but these proceedings aren’t advertised and attracted little or no attention. You’ve already read how the marine press responded to stepped-hull disasters; this institution is even more lame today than it was then.
So, buyer beware. Anyone with good enough credit can buy a boat that goes over 70 mph and just might rollover under circumstances that are difficult to predict. The only institution that is protecting the public appears to be the insurance industry, which is actually protecting itself.
Some insurers are requiring go-fast buyers to present a certificate from a training organization. The primary motivator may not be as much about hull design as the fact that there are, say, four 450-horsepower outboards attached to the transom of an applicant’s boat. Nevertheless, guys like Tres Martin include lessons in stepped-hull operation in their curriculums.
Martin was an accomplished “throttleman” from the same go-fast culture as Val Jenkins. Back when actor Don Johnson ruled the airwaves playing the lead on “Miami Vice,” Martin was ruling the actual waves of offshore racing, winning multiple world championships. He reinvented himself as a teacher when he founded Tres Martin Performance Boat School in 2004.
He and two other instructors teach 70 to 90 people a year. The courses cost between $2,000 and $3,600 for multiple days of instruction, including time on the water on a customer’s own boat. One of the most difficult parts of the job, Martin said, is telling a student that he or she had failed the course and they would not be getting the certificate needed to obtain insurance coverage for a boat already bought.
“There’s a lot of boats out there that are stepped bottoms developed by trial and error, not even involving a naval architect,” Martin said, acknowledging that some designs are still potentially dangerous. “All I’m here to do is keep people safe. Stepped bottoms are here to stay,” he said.
LOOSE CANNON covers hard news, technical issues and nautical history. Every so often he tries to be funny. Subscribe for free to support the work. If you’ve been reading for a while—and you like it—consider upgrading to paid.
What’s Happening In Your Parks – Charleston County Parks
Yoga Fest
Calling all yogis! On June 18, bring your yoga mat to James Island County Park for an evening celebrating the summer solstice. Yoga Fest promises something for everyone including live music as well as yoga classes for adults and kids! Register today to save $5 on admission.
Schedule your next date night, girls’ night, or family night at Dancing on the Cooper on June 13. Enjoy warm river breezes, beautiful twilight skies, and the sounds of your favorite oldies and beach tunes, played live for you as evening falls over the Mount Pleasant Pier. Get your tickets today!
Walk Through History
Curious how something as small as a grain of rice could be so important to Lowcountry history? On June 14, learn more about who grew rice, where it came from, and how the cultivation changed the landscape we know today as Caw Caw Interpretive Center.
Gone Fishin’
On June 14, scrap that Saturday morning to-do list and hit the pier for our Cast Off Fishing Tournament. Anglers of (almost) all ages are welcome to drop a line and compete for prizes and bragging rights!
Holiday Staycation
Your holiday getaway could be right around the corner! We’re raffling off a stay in one of our cottages at James Island County Park during the Holiday Festival of Lights. The best part? All proceeds are going to the Charleston County Parks Foundation. Donate for your chance to be the lucky winner.
Make Way at Isle of Palms County Park!
Thanks to the generosity of Waymaker Offroad Wheelchairs, Isle of Palms County Park now has an off-road wheelchair available for reservation! Together, we are dedicated to helping people with mobility impairments enjoy our parks with independence. Reserve today!
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