This week flew by with final edits, acoustic guitars, sketches of anchor systems and calls to Port Townsend Foundry in Washington State, one of the only remaining forges in the US. They create stunning, creative, powerful bronze vessel hardware, you can view their work here. We haven’t come to a consensus yet, but are confidant that owner Pete Langley has the talent and skill that we need to build the new, larger, system that we require. Their reputation is impeccable and the reason we chose to go to this level of quality and expenditure is because, as mentioned last week, it is very important to stay where you want to be on a vessel, especially if it is anywhere near land, shallow water or other obstacles, often other boats. The mariner’s term for this essential holding equipment is ground tackle.
The vision, the plan.
Since I received more than a few comments on this topic, I decided to link a story, originally entitled DRAGGING (modified to Eclipse Interrupted by the Editor), published in SAIL magazine, 2024. Since these sort of events seem to always happen at night, this truly depicts the heart-pounding terror that grips a sailor and crew when an anchor is no longer doing what it should. You feel like your hair is on fire. All hell has broken loose along with your ground tackle. Looking back and reliving the moment, I hope it conjures a dose of adrenaline and a dose of our reality; dragging an anchor really is bolt-upright-in-bed scary stuff with the potential for both danger and destruction. It’s the reason STEADFAST is upgrading the size of the anchor as well as its deployment and retrieval system.
Between what can happen when we’re on the water and what we have had to do to get back in the water, it’s no wonder friends far and wide are convinced we’re batshit crazy. I know that description still stands, and is probably as accurate as it could be.
What I also know is that it’s quite a unifying, satisfying feeling to be passionate enough about something to put our lives, savings, souls and energies into it.
We are engineering, thinking, consulting, sanding, priming, painting and preparing for this crucial install. Here are our workspaces:
Every day there’s a multitude of projects.
Right now SPARRING WITH MOTHER NATURE is mainly the weather—from 74 to 24(F) with an occasional downpour and north winds that chill to the bone…no complaints because some of this nation has had it much worse and our hearts are with them.
As always, thanks for being aboard. There’s nothing quite like STEADFAST, and nothing quite as dedicated as you, if you’ve gotten this far. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate it—-makes the whole project so much better when I can share it with the world. Wooden boats may or may not have been a topic that you would have chosen, so just remember, this mountain and desert dweller never imagined herself here, hauling anchors and meeting the eyes of dolphins. LIfe is good, if unpredictable.
All the best to you and what you are passionate about, whether it makes sense to everyone else or not! See you here next week. ~J
Hair is definitely on fire.
Thanks to SAIL magazine, I appreciated their publishing my work, here is the link:
Serious cruiser use anchor alarms for a reason! Sailing Vessel Roam’s Substack is interesting in regard to utilizing three alarms set simultaneously. They are currently on the other side of the planet; if you’re interested take a look, Jim is quite an informative writer!
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.
Marines assigned to the Mobile Reconnaissance Company, 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, work with their counterparts aboard a Swedish fast patrol craft to deploy an RQ-20 Puma tactical unmanned aerial system during Exercise Archipelago Endeavor 2022 at Berga Naval Base, Sweden. The UAV works in tandem with the SIMRAD navigation/surveillance radar, top right, to provide a positive identification of threat vessels. (Photo by Lance Cpl. Adam Scalin)
The Iranian-backed Houthis of Yemen yesterday opened a new front in the U.S.-Israeli war against Tehran. This Arab tribe gave the American military a preview of how 21st century assymetrical combat works when it launched attacks against the U.S. Navy in the Red Sea a few years ago. This story was originally published on January 28, 2024. The story seems topical today.
Celebrity endorsements are key to selling consumer products, but what if the celebrities themselves aren’t all that likeable? Ask Simrad, which manufactures a marine radar system that just enjoyed a big shout-out, thanks to our villains du jour, the Houthi rebels.
The Houthis are an Arab tribe that is fighting for control of Yemen, a strategic hunk of territory that dominates the Red Sea route to the Suez Canal. Like the Ukranian military, the Houthis are a disciplined, nimble and resourceful force, fighting the Yemeni government and the U.S. equipped and trained forces of Saudi Arabia.
Now, urged on by their sugardaddy Iran, the Houthis are disrupting world shipping traffic through the Red Sea as a way of pressuring the Israelis to back down over Gaza.
What has that got to do with Simrad?
Last week the New York Times published a story about Houthi resilience in the face of U.S. air strikes. The reporters gave a shout-out to a particular piece of gear that is helping to bedevil America and her allies—the Simrad Halo24 dome radar.
You can just read the word “Simrad” on the radar dome sitting under camouflage on top of a barrel. (U.S. Marine Corps photo)
The Houthis began buying Halo24s as they brawled with Saudi Arabia through the later half of the last decade. As it has done during the Ukraine war, the U.S. military kept a close watch to learn how Houthis were able to keep the better equipped Saudi forces at bay for half a decade. That’s how the Halo24 came up on the Pentagon’s radar, figuratively speaking
Shoot and Scoot
As Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt wrote in their Jan. 24 story in the Times:
Lt. Gen. Frank Donovan, now the vice commander of United States Special Operations Command, noticed what the Houthis were doing with the radar back when he was leading a Fifth Fleet amphibious task force operating in the southern Red Sea. Trying to figure out how the Houthis were targeting ships, General Donovan soon realized the Houthis were mounting off-the-shelf radars on vehicles on the shore and moving them around.
He challenged his Second Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion to develop a similar system.
While U.S. air forces are superbly capable of neutralizing super-expensive military-grade targeting stations, they are proving less effective at hitting cheap ($3,099 at West Marine) Halo24-based systems moved around in the beds of pick-up trucks.
Apparently, a Houthi fire team will raise a Halo24 dome on a pole temporarily while they fire a drone or missile and guide it toward a ship. Whether missile or drone, once it hits, misses or gets shot down, the tower is quickly lowered, disasembled and stowed, and the truck makes a getaway—shoot and scoot.
Like the civil war in Yemen, the Simrad Halo24 came into being around 2015, an improvement on the so-called Broadband Radar introduced a few years earlier by Simrad’s then-parent company Navico. Traditional radar uses something called a magnetron to produce repeated bursts or pulses of radio waves. Halo and earlier Broadband radars emit variable frequencies instead of single bursts.
Meanwhile, the Marine Corps has been reinventing itself as a force that could engage China asymetrically in a future conflict, using smaller Marine units to “fix” Chinese formations long enough for the U.S. and allies to concentrate forces and join in the fight.
Marines in a joint exercise with Philipine troops in November assemble a tower topped with a Halo24 dome radar. Height is the key to range over the water.
Yep, the Marines adopted both Houthi insurgency tactics and the Halo24, a radar intended for the recreational marine market, most definitely not intended for military use, according to Don Korte, the Simrad product manager in charge of the Halo project.
Korte said the radars were designed to work with Simrad’s proprietary multi-function displays, but the Marines have gone another route. One image released by the Marines shows a marine training with the Halo24 using a Dell laptop computer as the interface.
A U.S. marine trains to use an ordinary Dell laptop to interface with a Simrad Halo24 radar, using software from Cambridge Pixel. (U.S. Marine Corps photo)
The laptop is in SPx server mode, software developed by the British company Cambridge Pixel, a supplier of radar display, tracking and recording sub-systems. Here’s what the company said in 2017 about its system capabilities as applied to an autonomous surface vehicle or ASV. That is, a seagoing drone
Cambridge Pixel’s SPx Server radar tracking software receives radar video from the onboard radars, typically Navico’s Simrad 4G or Halo radars. The processing of video to detect targets of interest uses adaptive algorithms to accommodate a wide range of operating conditions. Initially, plots are extracted as detections from the radar that exceed a background level. These plots are then correlated to differentiate clutter from true targets.
Once the target has passed a confidence test, a provisional track becomes established and is subsequently tracked from scan to scan with a multi-hypothesis, multi-model tracker. Navigation data from the ship is used to compensate for own-ship motion. The output from the tracking server is combined with AIS targets, using the SPx fusion software, and the resultant fused track is provided as a standard ASTERIX or TTM message into ASV’s control software.
If you understand any of that, you can probably begin to see how a Halo24 with SPx or a similar software could guide an airborne suicide drone from a Yemeni beach to a passing container ship.
Halo24 has a theoretical max range of 48 miles; actual range depends on both the height of the dome above sea level and the height of the target.
This USA Today graphic shows the tactical environment as shipping through the Red Sea must first pass through a 20-mile gap before a gradual widening as they move northward.
According to Korte, instead of the four- and six-kilowatt magnetrons of traditional pulse radar, Halo uses up to 25 watts of power and a “spread-spectrum X-band transmitter” to send out a signal using what’s called “pulse compression.” The signal burst is comprised of up to six different pulse lengths consisting of a range of frequencies, rather than just one, that upon echo return provide large amounts of data about the distance and direction of targets.
Ben Ellison, founder of Panbo, a website devoted to marine electronics, wrote about Halo’s benefits when Simrad brought the technology to market about eight years ago:
Simrad’s designers understood that short pulses provide good minimum range, but poor long range performance. At the same time—you guessed it—long pulses work well at long range but don’t do so well up close. In layman’s terms, Simrad decided to transmit waves of a variety of frequencies every time, so the system will be effective over its full range, which the company says stretches from 20 feet to 72 nautical miles out (for Halo-6). The idea is that the radar will work just as well in close as far away.
Korte said the Halo radars were also an improvement over the previous Broadband 4G models because their higher power allowed better MARPA tracking of targets. MARPA stands for Mini-Automatic Radar Plotting Aid, and we civilians use it for collision avoidance.
But you can see how it might also assist in vectoring a moving aerial or surface vehicle to its collision with a moving target such as a ship. Halo can track 10 MARPA targets simultaneously, 20 in dual-screen mode, Korte said.
For us, one of the cool functions is the Halo24’s ability to operate displaying dual radar ranges overlaid on dual charts.
“You can do chart-chart with radar on dual range and when you change chart scale, the radar will automatically follow the chart range,” Korte said. “I worked very hard to make that work good.”
Masters of Their Own Domain
For the Marines, the name of the game is “maritime domain awareness,” a key mission under Force Design 2030. The Corps’ blueprint for future war-fighting includes a new “Littoral Regiment” that will “help the fleet and joint force win the reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance battle within a contested area at the leading edge of a maritime defense.”
Capt. Larry Boyd, a Marine officer involved in a joint exercise with Philipines forces in November 2023, highlighted the use of off-the-shelf sensors such as Simrad Halo24s, which he said allow “for a more seamless interoperability in building the maritime-domain-awareness picture.”
What he said.
The Houthis are not the first bad guys to burnish the good name of a product by purchasing them in mass. The Taliban’s choice of Toyota pick-up trucks—referred to as “technicals”—as a platform for their machine guns and missile launchers is another.
And the idea can be applied not just to products but services. In the war movie Full Metal Jacket the drill sergeant hilariously cites the Texas tower gunman (who killed 12 people) and Lee Harvey Oswald, both Marine veterans, as testament to the quality of the Corps’ marksmanship training. Like the Houthis, their achievements/crimes constituted an endorsement.
At this point, some readers may be thinking, so what? The Houthis are shooting at ships, but they haven’t sunk anything. The allied Navies are blasting Houthi ordinance out of the sky, and the one or two hits or ships haven’t caused much damage.
Alas, that argument is true, but it’s irrelevant truth. The fact that the threat exists at all has caused wholesale re-routing of world shipping. That creates delays and higher costs. Shippers’ insurance goes way up. It has been the cause of one of those supply-chain disruptions that everyone prattles on about.
Brunswick Connection
Simrad is now owned by Brunswick Corp., a $6,62 billion Fortune 500 company that absolutely dominates the market for boats, marine propulsion and boating accessories. Brunswick routinely reports to its stockholders about the potential for “acts of terrorism or civil unrest” to disrupt distribution channels or its supply chain.
Brunswick has six facilities in Europe, a continent that benefits mightily from movement of goods through the Suez. European car factories have actually had to shut down for lack of components coming from the Far East.
The irony is that while Brunswick is profiting from the military application of one of its recreational products, it too may be feeling a bit incovenienced by events in the Red Sea. Further deterioration might find Brunswick in the unique position of being hoist by their own petard, after first having profited from the sale of said petard.¹
Yeah, unlikely. I know.
LOOSE CANNON was miscast as a boating magazine electronics editor in a previously life. Marine electronics have become boring nowadays, but every once in a while…
Wikipedia: Hoist by his own petard is a phrase from a speech in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet that has become proverbial. The phrase’s meaning is that a bomb-maker is blown (“hoist”) off the ground by his own bomb (“petard”), and indicates an ironic reversal or poetic justice.
Few Floridian communities are as welcoming to the cruising community as CRUISERS NET SPONSOR, Fort Myers Beach! This is a town that knows how to treat cruisers.
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.
MSIB 02-26_Security Zone_Cooper River Bridge Run
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
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.
MSIB 02-26_Security Zone_Cooper River Bridge Run
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.
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 isSailing 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.
This 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.
This image shows one area where the bond between hull and grid 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 Words
Every 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.”
The U.S. Coast Guard took this photo of the overturned Cheeki Rafiki.
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.
Beneteau 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.
Lin Pardey has gone to sea again, and she has signed up for Loose Cannon.
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:
The reason I paid you for a sub was so I could send you a note—so will repeat here—I so so agreed with your post about the legal pitfalls of singlehanding. I have often wanted to write something similar, but several of my best friends crossed oceans on their own for various reasons, and my current partner did the same before we met so…Keep up the good work. And wish me luck as I begin my Substack journey. So far getting a nice number of readers. I am not good about asking for money, but hope more folks will add to my cruising kitty.
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:
She lives life with a grace and enthusiasm that the years have not dimmed. Her laughter is infectious and all that personality comes through in her writing. For any writer who wants to understand “voice,” just read Lin’s work.
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 theLoose 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.
MSIB 02-26_Security Zone_Cooper River Bridge Run
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!
Dear Members and Friends of the Royal Marsh Harbour Yacht Club,
As Commodore, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all of you for your enthusiastic participation in this year’s events in the Bahamas. It has truly been a wonderful and active season, filled with great camaraderie, memorable moments, and plenty of fun. While doing all that we also donated funds to several local organizations that support the yachting community.
We were especially fortunate to enjoy such beautiful weather—certainly a welcome contrast to much of what was experienced back in the United States.
While it is always bittersweet to see everyone depart, whether heading back home or continuing on to other parts of the Bahamas, we take comfort in knowing we will gather again next season. I look forward to welcoming you all back next year.
I would also like to express my deep appreciation to our Bridge members and committee chairs for their dedication and hard work. Your efforts made this season a great success.
Wishing each of you safe travels and a pleasant journey ahead.
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