Critical Mass This Month for 'Loose Cannon'

Subscriber List Reaches 3,000

Loose Cannon has just had a banner month. Two of the stories felt like being back at a daily newspaper—complete with errors, corrections and updates as events unfolded.

The month started with a popular story, centering on the efficacy of the venerable CQR anchor and went on to report on a Nordhavn towing disaster and the Starlink rescue of a crew whose sailboat was sunk in a whale collision. Most recently, Loose Cannon published an update about an Australian couple’s progress recovering their grounded motoryacht. Safe to say, Loose Cannon’s entire readership is cheering them on.

The audience responded to this coverage in a surge. Nothing like it has happened since Loose Cannon went live on the Substack media platform 15 months ago. So far this month alone, there have been 42,000 views and 200 new subscriptions, bringing us to the 3,000 mark.

Welcome aboard, new readers. And thank you.

You will now get nautical news in your inbox like a digital version of the newspapers that were once lobbed onto American doorsteps by kids on bikes.

A newsy “front page.” Believe it or not, in my earlier career I actually had to holler, “Stop the presses!” on more than one occasion. Loosecannon.substack.com

We used to say newspaper stories were the rough drafts of history. That surely applies here. Everyone needs a copy editor, but there’s no such thing at Loose Cannon—not in the budget. I’ve always been a fairly “clean” writer, but as much as I review my stuff before it goes to you, I find myself updating the website version several times over the first 24 hours, making corrections. That’s the great thing about Internet publishing.

My old newspapers had multiple overnight editions, each one with fewer typos and factual errors than the previous. In fact, the first edition off the press was called “the bulldog” because it was ugly with error. (Apologies to my friends with bulldogs.)

So, if you were first introduced to Loose Cannon via a teaser on Facebook (another old newspaper term), you probably were reading a pretty clean version of the story. Now that you’re subscribing, you may run across errors and omissions. Feel free to drop me a note via petercswanson@gmail.com. (Not helpful: “The story is full of misspellings.” Helpful: “You misspelled ‘Dyneema’ and ‘Soufriere’.”)

The Pitch

The vast majority of new subscriptions were free, which makes sense. It’s perfectly reasonable to sample a service before forking over your lunch money. Substack advises its writers to try to upsell the free audience on a monthly basis. Consider this note my belated compliance with best practice.

If you’ve been a free subscriber for a while, and if you enjoy the variety of stories (ad-free), and if you can afford it, please consider upgrading to paid. It’s not a lot of money, but it helps me stay in business, which is what this is. Kinda.

If you are already a paid subscriber, thanks again. You’ve given me the means to provide a unique service. I like what I do.

Coming Soon

Nautical songster Eileen Quinn: Where is she now?

Electric dinghies: Pricing, pros and cons.

A whole new approach to mooring fields.

Towing a tender: Insurance implications.

And, of course, any breaking news.