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Cruising Life
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How To Use RACONs for Coastal Cruising

Here’s some great advice from Skipper Tipsabout how to use RACONs to help you navigate safely when you’re cruising along the coast: Imagine you are approaching the busy port of Miami on a pitch black night, in blustery winds and a choppy sea. When still 6 miles away, you turn on your radar and see a cluster of buoys, beacons, and vessels, and each target appears as a separate dot on the radar scope. Your eyes strain with fatigue as you scan the cluster of contacts, trying to pick out the Miami sea buoy, marking the entrance to the harbor.…

Cruising Life
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How To Dock in Wind or Current

Here some great advice from Skipper Tips about how to dock safely even when there’s a strong wind or current. Take heed: Imagine you need to dock your boat in a strong, gusty wind between two other boats. The wind is blowing from ahead of your bow and parallel to the pier. How can you make this docking challenge easier? Follow these five easy steps. Stop into any marina on a weekend and you’re bound to see several great and not-so-great docking approaches. The best approaches are never about speed or quickness, but about command and control. Keep your bow…

Cruising Life
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Canadian Completes Greater Loop on a Kayak

Mark Fuhrmann,  a 65-year-old adventurer, just became the first person to complete the Great Loop on a kayak. Actually, Fuhrmann completed the so-called Greater Loop, since he started and ended in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His epic voyage covered 6,800 nm and lasted 268 days. Here’s the story from the Good News Network: After 268 days in his kayak, a 65-year-old has completed his epic ‘Reverse the Bad’ expedition, becoming the first person to solo kayak the Greater Loop across Canada and the United States. The journey of almost 6,800 miles (11,000km) required Mark Fuhrmann to paddle for 1,643 hours—which is…

Cruising Life
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9-year-old Girl a Star in Docking Competition

You’re worried about docking your boat? Take a look at Peyton Reiss, all of nine-years-old, who’s become a star in the Chesapeake Cowboys workboat docking competition. Peyton, from Tilghman Island, has no problems handling a workboat with the same speed and accuracy as professional waterman. Take a look at her performance last weekend during Waterman’s Appreciation Day at St. Michaels, Maryland, in this video from Chesapeake Bay Media: https://chesapeakebaymagazine.com/video-9-year-old-md-girl-wows-in-boat-docking-competitions/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edDl1cO-3U&t=1s

Electronics
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Stay Safe: Set Up Your Boat’s MMSI

Here’s some great advice from America’s Boating Club, formerly the U.S. Power Squadrons, about how to set up your MMSI (Maritime Mobile Service Identity), a major safety feature. Read on: If your boat has a dedicated marine radio, GPS or AIS, your boat systems are not complete until you also have a Maritime Mobile Service Identity, or MMSI. The nine-digit MMSI uniquely identifies your vessel, which is crucial in the event of an on-the-water emergency. “Each boat is unique. Beyond having a physical name that can be seen up close, each deserves to have its own MMSI that can be…

Cruising Life
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Push Tug Sinks Off Myrtle Beach, SC

U.S. Coast Guard and local authorities are responding to a 59-foot push tug that sank Tuesday night approximately three miles off North Myrtle Beach. Horry County Fire Rescue personnel rescued the three crewmembers aboard the tug. The vessel is currently in 30 feet of water and has approximately 5,000 gallons of diesel fuel on board. There are no reports of shoreline impacts, and the vessel’s owner is coordinating with local salvage to mitigate environmental and waterway impacts. Coast Guard crews are evaluating the site to determine if there is a specific navigational hazard. (The name of the tug has not…

Destinations
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Ford’s Terror on Airship, a Nordic Tug 44

For the past several years, Laura Dormela, a professional photographer from Portland, Oregon, has led a Slowboat flotilla of cruising boats up the Inside Passage from the San Juan Islands just above Seattle to Juneau, Alaska. She and her husband, Kevin Morris, the editor of an electronics journal, cruise on their 2006 Nordic Tug 44 named Airship. This summer, after the flotilla disbanded, they kept cruising. Recently they were in Tracy Arm, about 45 miles miles south of Juneau, with a breathtaking glacier (I was there many years ago with my friend Eric Schweikardt).  Then they went a bit farther…

Cruising Life
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Two Fisherman Rescue Owl Far From Shore

Here’s a mid-summer, feel-good story from My Modern Met. Read on: Taking a boat out on the open seas is a fun pastime for many people, especially during warmer months. For two men who went fishing in Florida, it unexpectedly became a rescue mission. A woman named Paige Galdieri shared an amazing story that happened to her brother and his friend. On a fishing trip over 20 miles away off the coast of Sarasota, Florida, an owl landed on one of their fishing rods. Realizing the poor bird got lost and was far away from home, the two men rescued…

Cruising Life
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Ten Tips for Docking Safely with Crew

Here is some easy-to-remember and easy-to-use advice from SkipperTips about how to prepare to dock safely, particularly in a crowded marina. Read on: You study the narrow marina entrance and note a gusty wind blowing across the channel. And, it looks like you’ll be bucking a strong tidal current once inside the marina. What steps can you take to prepare your boat and crew for the challenges ahead? 1. Point your bow into the dominant element. If wind and current are equal strength, head into the current. If docking under sail, use a close reach. 2. Line both sides of…

Cruising Life
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Feds Approve 3 New Offshore Wind Farms

Here’s a new report from gCaptain about the Biden Administration finalizing plans for three new wind farms  off Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. We don’t know yet how these will affect cruising and fishing in those areas: The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has finalized three offshore Wind Energy Areas (WEAs) in federal waters off the coasts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, which could potentially support between four and eight gigawatts of energy production. The three WEAs total approximately 356,550 acres. The first, known as WEA (A-2), is 101,767 acres and located 26 nautical miles (nm) from Delaware Bay. The…

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