Thanks to Dawn Matheson of GoChesapeake for forwarding this updated schedule, effective October 21st. GoChesapeake is a Cruisers Net sponsor and organizes the Marker 12 Event at Atlantic Yacht Basin for the boating community. See below for more details.
Marker 12 Events – Every Tuesday and Friday in October
Located at mile marker 12 on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, the Marker 12 Pop-Up Bar is open exclusively to our waterway guests.
This outdoor pop-up bar is open seasonally on Tuesdays and Fridays in May and mid-September thru mid-October and features locally brewed craft beers, wine and light hors d’oeuvres.
Hours
4:30 – 7:00 PM Tuesdays and Fridays Weather Permitting
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 hybrid jetski-pontoon boat accident that killed four women on a Maine lake happened after it had undergone recall repairs intended to improve stability underway, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.
The Sea-Doo Switch, subject of numerous Loose Cannon articles, is now the subject of a U.S. Coast Guard Safety Alert due to a “capsizing hazard.”
Maine Inland Fisheries & Wildlife initiated an investigation after a triple fatality over Labor Day weekend on Flagstaff Lake in Maine. One of the questions to be answered was whether the vessel had undergone safety repair work as part of a factory recall earlier in the year. The purpose of the repair was to make the vessel less like to flip forward.
According to the Coast Guard, the recall repairs had been performed on the vessel in question. “As a result, the Coast Guard is currently evaluating the recall repair procedures to determine if additional action is required to mitigate the hazard,” the Safety Alert said.
The Alert described the Switch “capsizing hazard” in this paragraph entitled “Vessel Design and Unsafe Operating Condition”:
The Switch is designed such that while at rest, its center hull allows water to enter the hull, and while operating on a plane, the entrained water empties. However, until the water fully empties, trim by the bow can occur, especially with passenger weight forward. The dynamics are such that any abrupt change in speed or direction could induce forces sufficient to cause capsizing, especially when slowing down towards idle speed.
You can download the Safety Alert in its entirety here:
None of the four fatalities and one case of lifelong incapitazation involved alcohol, according to investigators. So far, no charges have been filed against the operators involved in the accidents.
For more stories about the Switch, visit the Loose Cannon website and enter “Sea-Doo” into the search field.
LOOSE CANNON covers hard news, technical issues and nautical history. Sometimes 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.
The author chairs the Department of Science, Technology & Society at the Rochester Institute of Technology. This story was first published on October 15, 2025 in The Conversation and is reprinted here with permission.
By CHRISTINE KEINER
If you visit the Erie Canal today, you’ll find a tranquil waterway and trail that pass through charming towns and forests, a place where hikers, cyclists, kayakers, bird-watchers and other visitors seek to enjoy nature and escape the pressures of modern life.
However, relaxation and scenic beauty had nothing to do with the origins of this waterway.
When the Erie Canal opened 200 years ago, on October 26, 1825, the route was dotted with decaying trees left by construction that had cut through more than 360 miles of forests and fields, and life quickly sped up.
Mules on the towpath along the canal could pull a heavy barge at a clip of four miles per hour—far faster than the job of dragging wagons over primitive roads. Boats rushed goods and people between the Great Lakes heartland and the port of New York City in days rather than weeks. Freight costs fell by 90 percent.
As many books have proclaimed, the Erie Canal’s opening in 1825 solidified New York’s reputation as the Empire State. It also transformed the surrounding environment and forever changed the ecology of the Hudson River and the lower Great Lakes.
For environmental historians like me, the canal’s bicentennial provides an opportunity to reflect upon its complex legacies, including the evolution of U.S. efforts to balance economic progress and ecological costs.
Communities Ruptured
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Indigenous nations that the French called the Iroquois, engaged in canoe-based trade throughout the Great Lakes and Hudson River valley for centuries. In the 1700s, that began to change as American colonists took the land through brutal warfare, inequitable treaties and exploitative policies.
That Haudenosaunee dispossession made the Erie Canal possible.
After the Revolutionary War, commercial enthusiasm for a direct waterborne route to the West intensified. Canal supporters identified the break in the Appalachian Mountains at the junction of the Mohawk River and the Hudson as a propitious place to dig a channel to Lake Erie.
Yet cutting a 363-mile-long waterway through New York’s uneven terrain posed formidable challenges. Because the landscape rises 571 feet between Albany and Buffalo, a canal would require multiple locks to raise and lower boats.
An 1839 view looking eastward from the top lock at Lockport, N.Y., where a series of five locks raised the Erie Canal about 60 feet. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Federal officials refused to finance such “internal improvements.” But New York politician DeWitt Clinton was determined to complete the project, even if it meant using only state funds. Critics mocked the $7 million megaproject, worth around US$170 million today, calling it “DeWitt’s Ditch” and “Clinton’s Folly.” In 1817, however, thousands of men began digging the four-foot-deep channel using hand shovels and pickaxes.
The construction work produced engineering breakthroughs, such as hydraulic cement made from local materials and locks that lifted the canal’s water level about 60 feet at Lockport, yet it obliterated acres of wetlands and forests.
After riding a canal boat between Utica and Syracuse, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne described the surroundings in 1835 as “now decayed and death-struck.”
However, most canalgoers viewed the waterway as a beacon of progress. As a trade artery, it made New York City the nation’s financial center. As a people mover, it fueled religious revivals, social reform movements and the growth of Great Lakes cities.
Barges on the Erie Canal in Syracuse around 1900, before the canal’s commerce through the city was rerouted and stretches of it through downtown were filled in and paved. Its path is now Erie Boulevard. Detroit Publishing Company/Library of Congress
The Erie Canal’s socioeconomic benefits came with more environmental costs: The passageway enabled organisms from faraway places to reach lakes and rivers that had been isolated since the end of the last ice age.
Invasive Species Expressway
On October 26, 1825, Gov. Clinton led a flotilla aboard the Seneca Chief from Buffalo to New York City that culminated in a grandiose ceremony.
To symbolize the global connections made possible by the new canal, participants poured water from Lake Erie and rivers around the world into the Atlantic at Sandy Hook, a sand spit off New Jersey at the entrance to New York Harbor. Observers at the time described the ritual of “commingling the waters of the Lakes with the Ocean” in matrimonial terms.
Clinton was an accomplished naturalist who had researched the canal route’s geology, birds and fish. He even predicted that the waterway would “bring the western fishes into the eastern waters.”
Biologists today would consider the “Wedding of the Waters” event a biosecurity risk.
The Erie Canal and its adjacent feeder rivers and reservoirs likely enabled two voracious nonnative species, the Atlantic sea lamprey and alewife, to enter the Great Lakes ecosystem. By preying on lake trout and other highly valued native fish, these invaders devastated the lakes’ commercial fisheries. The harvest dropped by a stunning 98 percent from the previous average by the early 1960s.
Sea lampreys—eel-like creatures with mouths like suction cups—cut the lake trout population by 98%, and most of the fish that survived had lamprey marks on them. These invasive species began appearing in the Great Lakes after the Erie Canal opened. T. Lawrence/NOAA Great Lakes, CC BY-SA
Tracing their origins is tricky, but historical, ecological and genetic data suggest that sea lampreys and alewives entered Lake Ontario via the Erie Canal during the 1860s. Later improvements to the Welland Canal in Canada enabled them to reach the upper Great Lakes by the 1930s.
Protecting the $5 billion Great Lakes fishery from these invasive organisms requires constant work and consistent funding. In particular, applying pesticides and other techniques to control lamprey populations costs around $20 million per year.
The invasive species that has inflicted the most environmental and economic harm on the Great Lakes is the zebra mussel. Zebra mussels traveled from Eurasia via the ballast water of transoceanic ships using the St. Lawrence Seaway during the 1980s. The Erie Canal then became a “mussel expressway” to the Hudson River.
The hungry invading mussels caused a nearly tenfold reduction of phytoplankton, the primary food of many species of the Hudson River ecosystem. This competition for food, along with pollution and habitat degradation, led to the disappearance of two common species of the Hudson’s native pearly mussels.
Dense mats of water chestnut infesting the western end of the Erie Canal in 2010. The weeds cut off sunlight for aquatic plants and impede fish movement, and they must be mechanically removed. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Today, the Erie Canal remains vulnerable to invasive plants, such as water chestnut and hydrilla, and invasive animals such as round goby. Boaters, kayakers and anglers can help reduce bioinvasions by cleaning, draining and drying their equipment after each use to avoid carrying invasive species to new locations.
Recreational Treasure
During the Gilded Age in the late 1800s, the Erie Canal sparked a utilitarian sense of environmental concern. Timber cutting in the Adirondack Mountains was causing so much erosion that the eastern canal’s feeder rivers were filling up with silt.
To protect these waterways, New York created Adirondack Park in 1892. Covering 6 million acres, the park balances forest preservation, recreation and commercial use on a unique mix of public and private lands.
Erie Canal shipping declined during the 20th century with the opening of the deeper and wider St. Lawrence Seaway and competition from rail and highways. The canal still supports commerce, but the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor now provides an additional economic engine.
In 2024, 3.84 million people used the Erie Canalway Trail for cycling, hiking, kayaking, sightseeing and other adventures. The tourists and day-trippers who enjoy the historic landscape generate over $300 million annually.
Over the past 200 years, the Erie Canal has both shaped, and been shaped by, ecological forces and changing socioeconomic priorities. As New York reimagines the canal for its third century, the artificial river’s environmental history provides important insights for designing technological systems that respect human communities and work with nature rather than against it.
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.
All is quiet on the Atlantic front today. We don’t have any named storms to track and only a few features of interest. That’s no surprise, as we are exiting the most active part of the hurricane season.
This loop of visible satellite images shows clouds associated with the features of interest across the Atlantic Basin today.
Image Source: University of Wisconsin RealEarth
The view from space shows an intense non-tropical storm off the East Coast, a band of clouds over the northern Caribbean Sea and Central Atlantic, and two tropical waves to the east of the Windward Islands. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) tells us that there are two areas to watch for development over the next week.
The storm off the East Coast has a slight chance to gain tropical characteristics over the weekend while it’s passing over the Gulf Stream. It’s a 10 percent chance of becoming a named storm, they say. For us, it doesn’t matter because it’s moving to the east and won’t impact us directly, whether it’s tropical or not. It’s a big storm that will churn up a lot of the Atlantic, potentially causing beach and boating impacts from the storm’s swells. However, the storm’s swells will primarily be directed toward the east and south, making them more of a problem for places like Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the Atlantic-facing sides of the Greater Antilles than for the East Coast.
Of greater concern is the area to watch in the deep tropics. We have a pair of tropical waves moving in tandem across the tropical Atlantic east of the Windward Islands today, and you can see a gentle turning motion with the trailing one along 43° west. That’s the one that NHC has highlighted for possible development once it reaches the Caribbean Sea.
They’re giving it a 30 percent chance to develop over the next week. However, this feature will evolve slowly, and extending the window to 10 days would likely increase the development odds to even money or higher. Most computer models show a tropical cyclone prowling the central or western Caribbean Sea in a week or so. The Caribbean waters are very warm and contain a vast amount of heat energy to fuel a hurricane, so there would be a high ceiling on the potential intensity of a storm in this area.
However, that’s about all the valuable information that I can give at this point. There are too many variables in the long range to predict where this feature might eventually go. Most models show it turning north, crossing one of the Greater Antilles, and then tracking far to our east. However, a few indicate an eventual track toward the U. S. and possibly even South Carolina. If so, it would be more than 10 days from now, so there’s a lot of time to watch it.
The next name on this year’s list is Melissa, which is likely to be used for a storm in the Caribbean later next week or the following weekend. If the storm off the East Coast becomes tropical enough to earn a name, the next one on the list after Melissa is Nestor.
So, the bottom line is that hurricane season isn’t over yet, and we must remain prepared for potential threats. We all hope that the potential Caribbean development remains a Somebody Else’s Problem, but that’s not assured. If you’re not ready and need help getting prepared, hurricane.sc is your go-to resource for prep advice.
The Palmetto State remains in a stretch of tranquility that will continue through Saturday before a cold front moves in with a chance for rain on Sunday. Saturday looks lovely with a cool start followed by a warm afternoon; highs will mainly in the 75-80° range across the state. Then Sunday looks mainly cloudy, or with sun fading behind clouds along the Coastal Plain. The Upstate likely sees showers or steady rain starting before midday, while the rest of the state will likely have showers around during the afternoon and evening. A thunderstorm can’t be ruled out, but the severe storm risk is near zero. Most of the state sees 75-80° for highs again on Sunday, but the Upstate will be cooler due to the earlier arrival of rain.
The Upstate could see a modest amount of rain on Sunday (a quarter to half-inch), but widespread rain is unlikely elsewhere in South Carolina. That will only put a small dent in the Upstate’s drought, and relief elsewhere will be minimal.
This week’s U. S. Drought Monitor shows an end to the drought near the coast, but dry conditions continue elsewhere in South Carolina; about a fourth of the state is in drought.
The big soaking we ended up getting from last weekend’s coastal storm obliterated the drought across most of the Coastal Plain, but the rest of the state remains dry, and we can use whatever rain Sunday’s cold front brings.
Dry weather returns for Monday, and it looks like we’ll see another long dry spell get underway. Monday will be cooler with highs mainly in the lower 70s across the state. Tuesday looks warmer as southerly winds ahead of another cold front pull in warmer air. However, this next front will likely be moisture-starved and generate no rain here.
Wednesday through Friday all look like pleasant and dry days with highs in the 70s. Early indications are that the dry spell will continue through next weekend and maybe the first part of the following week.
Frank Strait Severe Weather Liaison S.C. State Climate Office
South Carolina Department of Natural Resources 260 D. Epting Lane West Columbia, SC, 29172
Keep your calendar clear: Every season in Washington, NC brings something new and exciting. Enjoy local festivals, area concerts, or waterfront adventure.
Makers Air and Staniel Cay Yacht Club, A CRUISERS NET SPONSOR, offer convenient flights to the Bahamas.
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With our boutique service, two-pilot crews, and flawless safety record, you can trust us to take care of the journey so you can focus on what matters most: time together.
Thanks to our friends at Fernandina Harbor Marina for this information regarding Snag-a-Slip’s Bankruptcy:
We have some information about snag a slip that applies to all marinas . They filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and are no longer providing assistance through their website.
“Snag a slip is no longer a viable platform to make reservations. All users of this platform should contact the marina of choice directly or via their website.” If there are any further questions please reach out to Nate Parsons, 904-310-3303 or Chris Ferguson 904-310-3302 or via email. Thank you for your time.
If you contact snag a slip this is the message you receive: We regret to inform you that Snag-A-Slip has filed a Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition and has ceased operations effective immediately. Our team can no longer manage reservations, and payments or respond to customer service inquiries.
Further information about the case may be obtained through the Delaware Bankruptcy Court’s website, at https://www.deb.uscourts.gov/. The clerk’s office will provide all known creditors with notice of the case and details about whether and when proofs of claim need to be filed. Snag-A-Slip LLC is Case No. 25-11798.
Our Outer Banks National Parks Need Your Help: Now More Than Ever
Thank you for being a supporter of our Outer Banks national parks! We’re so grateful for people like you who understand how important it is to protect and enhance these special places, now and for future generations.
As you’ve seen in the news, the government has shut down due to a lapse in federal appropriations. While the Department of the Interior has issued a contingency plan which directs national park sites to remain mostly open, our parks will be operating with significantly less staff and visitor resources. At this time, we do not know how long the shutdown may last.
Recently, the National Park Service released its 2024 Visitor Spending Effects Report. Nearly 3.5 million visitors spent close to $698 million in the communities around our three Outer Banks national parks in 2024, supporting more than 7,500 jobs, generating approximately $296 million in labor income and $913 million in economic output, while adding close to $526 million in value. Disruptions to our parks’ operations will have a direct effect on our broader Outer Banks community.
As someone who cares about our Outer Banks national parks, you know our parks are not immune to the challenges facing many other national parks today — severe beach erosion and threatened oceanfront structures, wear and tear from the high volume of visitors, and limited or lapsed federal funding are impacting these treasured places. Our parks need your help now more than ever.
Here’s how you can help our national parks today:
Donate: Outer Banks Forever is the official nonprofit partner of Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, and Wright Brothers National Memorial. By raising funds for these special places, we help protect and enhance them, now and forever. Your donation – of any amount – supports the projects, programs, and people that make our Outer Banks national parks the best they can be! If you’d like to give a gift to support our parks, please click here.
Shop online: You can support our Outer Banks national parks by shopping our online store! Your purchase ensures that future generations continue to learn and create memories in the Outer Banks through history, conservation, and the celebration of innovation.
Say thank you: Our Outer Banks national park staff and volunteers work diligently to provide you with the margin of excellence you have come to expect when visiting these amazing places. We encourage you to thank our national park staff and volunteers for helping to protect our parks and park visitors. If you’d like to share a favorite Outer Banks national park memory, a story of how our park staff and volunteers have impacted your visit, or how our parks have made a difference in your life and the lives of your loved ones, click here.
Stay informed: Look for our emails in your inbox and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to stay up to date with Outer Banks national park happenings. We will share information about the government shutdown and its impact on our parks as we receive it.
Thank you again for your support of our Outer Banks national parks. We can’t do what we do without people like you!
With gratitude,
Bryan Burhans, Director Nicole Erickson, Development & Adoption Programs Manager Rachael Graf, Community Engagement Coordinator Outer Banks Forever
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.
San Salvador is the first place Christopher Columbus set foot in the Western Hemisphere, and we know this because the great 20th century sailor-historian Samuel Eliot Morison said so, and all contrary theories crumbled under scrutiny.
But the dude may have been wrong about the second island where Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria dropped anchor. Morison contended Island Two was Rum Cay. But Loose Cannon’s favorite sailor-schoolar, the late Donald McGuirk of Bradenton, Florida, begged to differ. McGuirk argued that it was actually Samana Cay.
By now some readers are probably thinking, “Who gives a flying farthing which cay came in second?” I could reply that a voyage which is still more consequential for civilization than the Moon landings deserves to be understood in granular detail. That probably would have been McGuirk’s position.
But, hey, who am I kidding? I’ve liked the idea of Samana Cay ever since I read in an old Bahamas cruising guide about how someone in a Morgan Out Island 41 once rode out a hurricane behind Samana Cay’s fringing reef. I never made it there myself, but always thought it would be enormously satifisfying to anchor my own OI 41 there for a couple of nights.
(Another irrational attraction to McGuirk’s scholarship is the fact that the veteran of the U.S. Army Air Corps named his 33-foot Southern Cross cutter Gooney Bird. That was the nickname for the C47 transport aircraft—my father flew in C47s throughout World War II and the Berlin Airlift.)
McGuirk wrote a paper on the subject entitled, “Why Samana Cay is the Second Island Visited During Christopher Columbus’s Sail Through the Bahamas on his First Voyage to the New World,” which you can download below.
McGuirk investigation report is the kind of writing that would appeal to any nerd who is happiest at the intersection of history, geography and sailing.
Debated for centuries, most historians now accept San Salvador (previously Watling Island) Bahamas as the first “New World” island visited by Columbus in 1492.1 His course through the additional three Bahama Islands visited before reaching Cuba has received less critical attention. There are two reasons for this. First, the standard translation of Columbus’s log leaves few choices for the three islands beyond San Salvador. Second, the current and widely accepted course has the approval of Samuel Eliot Morison, a luminary in his field.2 He baptized the other three islands visited, as Rum Cay (Island Two), Long Island (Island Three), and a combination of Crooked Island and Fortune Island (Island Four).
Columbus’s log, transcribed by Bartolomé de las Casas, can be interpreted in more than one way when it talks about what happened after the fleet left San Salvador, according to McGuirk. One of the interpretations has Columbus bypassing Rum Cay en route to another island anchorage.
Also, as anyone who has sailed there can attest, Rum Cay is nowhere near 15 by 30 miles in size, yet these are the dimensions attributed to Island Two.
The Las Casas diary is often referred to as the only primary source for Columbus’ first voyage, but McGuirk contended that Juan de la Cosas map from around 1500 provided important clues, while perhaps meeting the definition of a primary source better than that of the Diario.”
This is a detail of the New World discoveries in the Juan de la Cosa world planisphere dated 1500, created about eight years after Columbus’s voyage. This is the only world map created by a witness to the first and second voyages of Columbus.
And this is a detail from the map that McGuirk is reliant upon for his argument. Guanahami is San Salvador, though it appears to be misplaced.
Since Morison’s final word on this subject in 1974, three subsequent works have attempted to match current Bahama Island placenames with their original Taino counterparts. These works match Guanahani with current-day San Salvador,26 Samana with Samana Cay, Yumay (Yuma) with Long Island, and Someto (Samoet) with Crooked and Fortunate Island. The position of the unnamed island on the La Cosa map suggests Rum Cay.
The fact that the placename Samana appears on the la Cosa map, and a likely unnamed Rum Cay does not, suggests Samana Cay is Island Two, found after bypassing an unnamed Rum Cay.
Island Order: Morison Versus McGuirk
Here McGuirk makes a dead-reckoning argument:
On October 22, Columbus mentioned that he named the southwest cape of Island Three “Cabo Verde.” Had Columbus sailed west from Samana Cay to Long Island, this cape would have been precisely where Columbus would have arrived. On a Rum Cay approach to Long Island, Columbus never arrives at Cabo Verde.36 The cape doesn’t fit into Morison’s route.
If Rum Cay is Island Two, then Columbus must arrive at the north end of Long Island. Joseph Judge and the National Geographic Magazine have done an excellent job of recognizing the inadequate match of the Diario’s description of Fernandina with this location, while also demonstrating an excellent match of that geography with the south end of Long Island.
Support for Rum Cay is also debatable on the proposition that the diary transcriber kept mixing up similarly spelled compass points. “In all, the Las Casas transcription has twelve corrections of compass points. These corrections document Las Casas’s difficulties in transcribing sailing directions from a scribe’s copy,” McGuirk wrote.
The author goes on to note all manner of inconsistencies regarding times and distances, and I would invite anyone wishing to descend into these weeds, download McGuirk’s paper, which ends with:
Morison has always had a robust theory of Columbus’s route through the Bahama Islands. That theory, however, does have its inconsistencies. Ife’s translation has opened the possibility of an alternative route. The information above and the Bahama toponyms on the Juan de la Cosa map, a primary source of information, strongly suggest That Samana Cay is Columbus’s Island Two. The inconsistencies within the Diario will always hamper any attempt to recreate Columbus’s route. Any route envisioned by researchers will depend on which Diario information they accept and which they choose to ignore.
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