Last Thursday at 9:07 am, the Coast Guard Sector Virginia’s Command Center received a distress call from the 57-foot sportfishing boat Turn Me Loose that was sinking 34 miles southeast of Virginia Beach. The two men onboard, 30-year-old Jeffrey Hudson and his 60-year-old father Robert Hudson, said the boat was sinking quickly and they had to deploy their life raft and abandon ship. They said they would switch on their EPIRB. The CG watch standers issued an immediate all-ships distress alert and launched a 45-foot Response boat from Little Creek and a jay Hawk chopper from Air Station Elizabeth City.…

As far as we can tell, this is the second time this has happened, a ship loaded with electric cars that are powered by lithium batteries caught fire last week and had to be abandoned at sea. On June 3, the car carrier Morning Midas caught fire 220 miles south of Adak, Alasks. The fire appears to have started near the stern and it is highly likely that the cause is the spontaneous combustion of an EV battery. As we have learned, lithium battery fires are very hard to put out and will spread from one battery to the next.…

One of the propositions we often hear with modern hybrid diesel-electric mid-range cruisers that are fitted with solar panels is that the boat will, or at least should, operate all electrical functions overnight without the need to run a generator. This “silent mode” is a very attractive idea as none of us enjoys sharing an anchorage with a boat running at genset. But can this really work? And, what size battery bank do you need to achieve such energy independence? It turns out in a real two-day test in Spain aboard a Greenline 45 Fly Hybrid, British yachting journalist Alex…

The Army Corps of Engineers announced in early May that the famous Dismal Swamp Canal had reopened on May 6 after months of maintenance.  The canal is 40 miles long and runs from Chesapeake, Virginia to South Mills, North Carolina. The canal has a controlling depth of only six feet and is only 150 feet wide so larger vessels will have to stay in the ICW to get between the Chesapeake and Albermarle Sound.  Still, most cruising boats will find the canal well worth a transit. The length of the canal is a no-wake zone so it usually takes all…