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SECURITY ZONE in Charleston SC for the COOPER RIVER BRIDGE RUN on March 28, 7:00 am to 11:00 am. This is just north of Cruisers Net’s sponsor Charleston Harbor Resort and Marina, a first-class marina and location to stay during a visit to Charleston.
Good morning Charleston Stakeholders,
Please find attached a MSIB regarding the upcoming Cooper River Bridge Run. The details are below as well, thank you!
The Coast Guard will enforce a temporary security zone on certain waters of the Cooper River, near the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge during the Cooper River Bridge Run on Saturday, March 28, 2026, from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. This temporary security zone prohibits persons and vessels from entering, transiting through, anchoring in, or remaining within the security zone unless authorized by the Captain of the Port Charleston or a designated representative. Official event patrol can be contacted via VHF Channels 16 and 22A.
For questions or concerns regarding this MSIB, please contact the Sector Charleston 24-hour Command Center at (833) 453-1261.
Very respectfully,
LT Nicholas Jones
WWM Division Chief
USCG Sector Charleston
Nicholas.J.Jones@uscg.mil
O: 843-740-3184
C: 843-323-7761
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SECURITY ZONE in Charleston SC for the COOPER RIVER BRIDGE RUN on March 28, 7:00 am to 11:00 am. This is just north of Cruisers Net’s sponsor Charleston Harbor Resort and Marina, a first-class marina and location to stay during a visit to Charleston.
Good morning Charleston Stakeholders,
Please find attached a MSIB regarding the upcoming Cooper River Bridge Run. The details are below as well, thank you!
The Coast Guard will enforce a temporary security zone on certain waters of the Cooper River, near the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge during the Cooper River Bridge Run on Saturday, March 28, 2026, from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. This temporary security zone prohibits persons and vessels from entering, transiting through, anchoring in, or remaining within the security zone unless authorized by the Captain of the Port Charleston or a designated representative. Official event patrol can be contacted via VHF Channels 16 and 22A.
For questions or concerns regarding this MSIB, please contact the Sector Charleston 24-hour Command Center at (833) 453-1261.
Very respectfully,
LT Nicholas Jones
WWM Division Chief
USCG Sector Charleston
Nicholas.J.Jones@uscg.mil
O: 843-740-3184
C: 843-323-7761
Cruisers Net publishes Loose Cannon articles with Captain Swanson’s permission in hopes that mariners with saltwater in their veins will subscribe. $7 per month or $56 for the year; you may cancel at any time.
When all else fails, try journalism. Born To Race, Built To FailHow a Beneteau’s Glued-Together Construction Nearly Killed Its Delivery Crew
The author has one of the few YouTube sailing channels worth watching. He’s a U.S. Navy vet who spent five years as a navigator aboard a submarine. The channel is Sailing Zingaro, named after the Oyster 485 that he later sailed with his wife. Evenson is also the author of “Be the Captain,” a book of lessons about leadership at sea. The bilge pump started coming on somewhere off Haiti. The first time, the skipper checked the obvious things, found nothing, and kept sailing. The wind was building. Thirty-five knots, gusting 45. Gale conditions on a boat designed to go fast, not far. They were triple reefed on the main and jib. By the time the crew was 150 miles from land, the pump was cycling every fifteen seconds. This was a Beneteau First 47.7. Farr-designed. High rig, nine-foot fin keel. A performance boat, beautiful to sail, the kind of thing that wins races and looks good doing it. The skipper was a professional delivery captain with thousands of offshore miles behind him. He had put together a crew and taken the job without hesitation. Bahamas to Cartagena. Routine crossing. It stopped being routine somewhere around midnight on the final night. “The floorboards were floating. We were on our knees with a vacuum cleaner, bailing a 47-foot sailboat in a gale. The pump died, so we got the shop vac,” he says. “Taking turns vacuuming water out of the bilge. Half an hour on, half an hour off. Nobody sleeping. And then the batteries died.” No autopilot. No instruments. No pump. The crew hand-steered in 40-knot winds in the dark, still bailing. What saved them was geography. The Sierra Nevada mountains blocked the wind as they rounded the Colombian headland. The water ingress slowed. They reached Cartagena at dawn. When they hauled the boat, they found out why it had been trying to sink them. The BuildThis is how the First 47.7 is built. And it is not unique to Beneteau: The hull comes first: a fibreglass shell, curved and stiff in that shape, but structurally incomplete on its own. Then a prefabricated internal grid is built separately. This is the skeleton of the boat, with the berths, bulkheads and cabinetry designed into it before it ever sees the hull. This is a cost-effective way to build boats. Efficient. Modular. You can vary the layout without retooling the hull. The grid drops into the hull. Contact surfaces get coated with methacrylate adhesive. Structural glue, aerospace-grade. The grid squishes it down and that bond is what holds the two halves of the boat together. On most production boats under 50 feet, that glue is the only connection between the grid and the hull. No fiberglass tabbing over the joins. No mechanical fasteners. Just the adhesive. For most boats, sailed as intended, it works fine. The industry builds hundreds of thousands of boats this way. The First 47.7 is not sailed as intended by most of its owners. It is a racing machine pressed into service as a cruiser. The tall rig and deep fin keel that make it fast also put the hull under loads that a typical cruising boat never sees. In heavy weather on a beam reach, the sails drive the mast sideways while the keel fights back. The hull is caught in the middle, flexing with every wave, every gust. “You can reef the sails,” the skipper says. “You cannot reef the keel.” Over 20 years, on a boat that has been raced hard, those constant small flexes add up. The methacrylate bond works a little every time the boat moves. Eventually, it stops working. On this boat, the grid had separated from the hull along most of its length, running forward from the keel area. The glue had failed.
The hull was flexing independently of the grid. The keel bolt bedding had cracked under the stress and seawater was travelling up through the penetrations from inside the structure. The hull below the waterline was completely intact. The water was coming from within. “We were lucky we didn’t lose the keel out there. If that keel comes off, 150 miles from land, in those conditions—that’s it.” Four WordsEvery delivery skipper knows the infamous case of the Cheeki Rafiki. A Beneteau First 40.7, the smaller sister ship of the boat he had just delivered. Same designer, same construction, same proportions, just seven feet shorter. In 2014, being delivered from Antigua to the U.K., the keel failed. The boat capsized. Search aircraft found the hull floating in the middle of the Atlantic, mast-down. The EPIRB had activated. A life raft was recovered. They never found the four crew. The captain’s last transmission was four words: “This is getting worse.” The skipper of the First 47.7 knew all of this. He just hadn’t been thinking about it at two in the morning with water over the floorboards and no batteries. That’s not what you think about out there. You think about the next fifteen minutes. It was only in port that he put it together. The boat he had just stepped off and the boat at the bottom of the Atlantic were essentially the same boat. “That is the exact thought I had. In that cabin. Two in the morning, batteries dead, water over the floors,” he says. “In the haul-out footage, I’m laughing,” he says. “Dark humor. Relief that we made it. When I started researching a possible remediation, I opened up the accident report and read that final transmission from the Captain…I got goosebumps. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen it before.”
An inquest followed the loss of Cheeki Rafiki. Questions were raised about the boat’s condition before departure—prior grounding damage, gaps in the pre-departure inspection. A better-maintained boat might have survived that crossing. But this failure mode did not start with Cheeki Rafiki, and it did not end there. Grid separation, adhesive degradation under sustained offshore loading, keel bolt stress working upward through the structure. It is not a freak occurrence. It is a known consequence of sailing a boat hard beyond the loads it was designed for. And the conversation about it, in this industry, has always been very quiet.
The QuestionBeneteau builds good boats for what they are designed to do. The First series is well-engineered for coastal sailing, racing, short offshore hops. The boats are great to sail, and the price point is inclusive. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem is that many of these boats are marketed as CE class A offshore and sold into a much wider world. They show up on offshore rally start lines. They are bought by cruisers planning ocean passages. And the construction method at the core of this failure is not in any brochure. Most surveyors are not specifically trained to find it. Buyers are not told to look for it. The skipper puts it charitably: “If you buy a sports car and take it off-road and the suspension fails, is that the manufacturer’s fault?” It is a reasonable question. It is also worth noting that sports cars are not advertised with images of desert crossings. If you own a production boat of this type, pull the floorboards. Look at every contact point between the grid and the hull. You are looking for cracks, gaps, or any separation at all. Check the bulkhead behind the mast for stress cracking where it meets the deck. If you are buying a used boat, do not rely on the surveyor to find this. It can be filled and painted over. You need to look yourself. The Cheeki Rafiki crew were experienced sailors. They knew what they were doing. The captain’s last words were “This is getting worse.” Don’t let that be you.
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 saltwater in their veins will subscribe. $7 per month or $56 for the year; you may cancel at any time.
When all else fails, try journalism.
The Grand Dame of bluewater sailing has weighed in on the controversial issue of solo sailing. And Lin Pardey put her money where he mouth is. Pardey didn’t have to subscribe to Loose Cannon to connect, but maybe she felt having paid status would help get our attention:
Yes, Pardey is voyaging again with her new beau, and she is writing about it on her Go Now! Substack newsletter. The other half of the famous partnership, her late husband Larry, died in 2020. Lin Pardey is 82. A recent pair of stories about the pitfalls of singlehanding received a lot of reader pushback, which Loose Cannon described as cult-like devotion to the notion.
The Pardey’s themselves have been controversial as they promoted their philosophy of engineless (and toiletless) ocean voyaging. Christine Kling is also on Substack with Sailingwriter. This author and friend of Loose Cannon calls herself a Pardey “fan girl.” Kling once wrote:
Then, there is a dissenting view from author and fellow Substacker J.R. Roessl (Out of Step) who once referred to Lin Pardey as “the Wicked Witch of the West,” based on her interactions with the Pardeys while cruising with her family as a teenager in the early 1970s. Her sailing memoir “Unmoored: Coming of Age in Troubled Waters” describes the Pardeys as self-righteous and nasty.
The point of all this is the not-so-subtle message that Loose Cannon covers the issues and personalities in our little world of cruising with depth and nuance. The goal is to create an online environment where readers can discuss and disagree without devolving into a cage-fight. As far as readership, free subcriptions greatly outnumber the paid, as one would expect. My goal is to keep both categories growing at the same pace. There is no paywall for the latest stories, with the hope that once people find themselves reading with regularity, they will upgrade to a paid subscription. For example, Loose Cannon has been publishing stories for more than six years, yet there are 3,087 people who signed up in 2022 and 2023 that are still reading for free. Those who read Loose Cannon a lot should consider upgrading to paid, if they can afford to do so. (If you can’t, no problem. Share the love instead. Share stories you like with others.) Also a reminder: Another free resource for the nautically minded is the Loose Cannon Facebook page, which features daily links to stories about “boats, boating and waterways,” not written by, but curated by us. (For example, did you know that Publix supermarket is opening a store on the Savannah waterfront with its own dock?) Finally, another way to support the writing is to drink more tequila, specifically from Bellagave, the distiller that bravely became Loose Cannon’s sole sponsor. (See our pitch below.) 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. |
SECURITY ZONE in Charleston SC for the COOPER RIVER BRIDGE RUN on March 28, 7:00 am to 11:00 am. This is just north of Cruisers Net’s sponsor Charleston Harbor Resort and Marina, a first-class marina and location to stay during a visit to Charleston.
Good morning Charleston Stakeholders,
Please find attached a MSIB regarding the upcoming Cooper River Bridge Run. The details are below as well, thank you!
The Coast Guard will enforce a temporary security zone on certain waters of the Cooper River, near the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge during the Cooper River Bridge Run on Saturday, March 28, 2026, from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. This temporary security zone prohibits persons and vessels from entering, transiting through, anchoring in, or remaining within the security zone unless authorized by the Captain of the Port Charleston or a designated representative. Official event patrol can be contacted via VHF Channels 16 and 22A.
For questions or concerns regarding this MSIB, please contact the Sector Charleston 24-hour Command Center at (833) 453-1261.
Very respectfully,
LT Nicholas Jones
WWM Division Chief
USCG Sector Charleston
Nicholas.J.Jones@uscg.mil
O: 843-740-3184
C: 843-323-7761
Members of the RMHYS enjoy special and beautiful times together in Abaco’s. Membership is open to all. ” Give ’em a shout. You will be glad you did. If you are cruising the Bahamas this winter, consider joining Royal Marsh Harbour Yacht Club, a premier yacht club in the Abacos and A CRUISERS NET SPONSOR!
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What an honor to have all of you aboard. Please, stay, enjoy, learn and share. If you just found our engaging little community, please read SPARS & SPARRING, .….it introduces my wonders and my wanders. ~J I received a dozen tornado watch notifications while still trying to revel in the magic of a hundreds-strong pod of dolphins on the equator. When the afternoon blizzard stuck, completely blocking my view of the building next door (I shit you not), I couldn’t resist my favorite sarcasm of the season, “Nice ladder-climbing weather,” because, of course, that is what we have to do to do what we have to do. Reality set in, I doubled up my Smartwool socks and headed out. Later on it was cold but we had a mix of sun and clouds; the sky seemed impossibly blue as I gazed up at the rig. I deconstructed the protective winter tent/greenhouse that allowed us to smooth and beautify our bottom, and are making tremendous strides finishing the rebuild of STEADFAST’s bow. Contemplating this week’s content, I came across this photo, which ties together everything this crew has been working toward; the crucial reconstruction project intricacies that still lie before us and what we will most certainly, most hopefully, encounter on our passages this fall and forevermore; Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphins.
Of most interest right now is the intricate, layered teak deck and the numerous rigging components, (which hasn’t looked like that in a long time); I imagine you’re as surprised to read this as I was to write it, dolphin-obsessed as I am. However, sometimes the practical things simply must capture our attention, even if we’re left-brained.(!) None of the essential topside deck or hardware is yet reattached, and none of the creatures on the left are ever guaranteed. There are no guarantees, but if you ever have this opportunity, and you lean over, dolphins will meet your eyes, which makes me tingle all over. OK, back to practicalities…
The aforementioned intricacies of STEADFAST’s deck are exactly why Sailor Steve is absorbed by engineering, calculating, measuring, defining contact points, angles, strengths and the like while collecting bronze rod, oak, teak and tenacity. Importantly, this is only a third of what his boat-loving brain is processing. (foreshadowing) Since we don’t do anything in particularly small style, STEADFAST is the recipient of an entirely new anchor system; that decision came with some difficulty and considerable financial burden but has practicality and safety on its side. Throughout the project we have insisted that all materials and a tremendous majority of the style components were original. We even reclaimed the planks from a factory built in the same era, long over a century ago. Traditional William Hand Jr designs nearly all had a starboard bow anchor hause pipe (a channel for the anchor chain and shank that goes from the deck down to the starboard hullside near the waterline) where the anchor is stored while underway or at a dock. This system saves space on deck, is a classic design of the times and eliminates traditional bow anchor chain stress. Unfortunately and importantly it also trapped moisture and perpetrated some deterioration of her hull, as seen in the photos below. Steve’s theory, the less holes in the hull of the vessel, the better. Whether you are experienced or not in the artful sport of using wind as propulsion, (and if you’ve read my more harrowing descriptions), you can imagine that the anchor, no matter how tightly it is restrained, can do some pretty impressive slamming on the bow as we spar with Mother Nature, borrowing her forces to propel us forward and being repelled (or additionally propelled) by what I consider the most powerful, consistent force on the planet, waves. Even tidal waves and currents are powerful and often underestimated—most of us know this simply by wading into a calm ocean on a picturesque beach; it’s impressive, surprising, and effortlessly tugs your feet from beneath you. Imagine the pressure and strength of waves that are many feet taller and pushed by not just the orbit of the moon, but winds which can be light, gusty, consistent, strong, and is nearly always unpredictable. Right or wrong, with forgiveness asked of the famed designer William Hand Jr, Steve decided to not replace the starboard hause pipe and rather to redesign the anchor system, moving it to STEADFAST’s newly reconstructed stem and bow. No small task, and no wonder his hair has gone a little (more) Einstein.
With each rebuild, an opportunity to improve…. On STEADFAST, it is the physically smaller of the crew who manages the anchor deployment and retrieval (yep, that’s me). While that should not matter, it’s in the forefront of this relatively new sailor’s mind. Perhaps the most important thing in a boat is not how it goes forward, but how to keep it in place when necessary. After all, if we cannot do that, dangers abound close to shore, perils that can and will destroy, debilitate and least of which embarrass to no end. It’s ironic that what is a final step in the long rebuild process, and not as grand as new planks and a glorious exotic stem, is also the most technical and essential to what we have already accomplished. The smooth new teak ridge on the left is inelegantly referred to as a ‘mud board’ which was designed to deflect dirty water from anchor retrieval back into the sea rather than down our decks. On the right is the glue-laminated oak anchor platform, which is currently being meticulously encased in teak. The new system is designed for a large primary anchor on starboard and a secondary storm anchor on port.
The top component on the left, the bitt, is the bottom component on the right. We are STEADFASTly moving forward, and I hope warmer weather will prevail! March 20th was Equinox, so no matter if you are moving into fall or into spring, beautiful change is in the air. Until next week….thanks for staying on board; it’s crucial ballast! ~J If you think my work is worthy, restack this baby and then, if you have time, tell me what you liked. Or not. No pressure! Glad we’re in this together. Share SPARRING WITH MOTHER NATURE In case you missed how we (painstakingly) found the proper planking, enjoy. Lots of other stories in the archives, too, on my home page.
And a harrowing experience:
I so appreciate your support of my work. Have a wonderful week!
© 2026 Janice Anne Wheeler
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