The 12-day Great Loop attempt this article was written about never finished. Robert Youens and Steve Hernden left Chickasaw, Alabama on 13 July 2026 aiming to go under ten days, and stopped eight days later at Erie, Pennsylvania, with the hull cracking under them. Two other crews then rewrote the record book in the space of a fortnight in September.
Here is where the Great Loop speed records actually stand after the 2026 season, and what the season showed about the boats.
The record book after September 2026
| Category | Time | Holder | Boat | When |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Outright | 11d 21h 51m | Dustin Kidd and Marc Crutcher, White Lightning | 2027 Highfield Sport 800 RIB, twin Yamaha 200s | 6–18 Sep 2026 |
| Solo / single-engine | 18d 5h 23m | Martin Bysiewicz, Fast Marine | Sea-Doo RXT-X 325 | 17 Aug – 4 Sep 2026 |
| Jon boat | 19d 13h 1m | Robert Youens | 16′ Weldbilt, 60 hp Tohatsu | 12–31 Jul 2025 |
| Previous outright | 12d 18h 10m | Peter Hajas, Lady Lor | 40′ Contender, triple Yamaha 350s | 9–21 Jul 2025 |
White Lightning left the Kentucky Dam end of Kentucky Lake at 1:14 p.m. on 6 September and crossed its own wake there on the morning of 18 September, at 11:05 — 20 hours 19 minutes inside the mark Lady Lor had held for fourteen months. Their tracker logged about 4,280 miles at an average of 15.0 mph.
Two weeks earlier Martin Bysiewicz had taken the solo and single-engine marks on a jet ski, closing the Loop under the Sunshine Skyway just after midday on 4 September: 5,255 GPS miles, 18 days 5 hours 23 minutes, about 12 mph. That beat Youens by 1 day 7 hours 38 minutes and the Guinness-ratified PWC record by 4 days.
Why the mileage never matches
The Loop is usually described as a 6,000-mile circuit, and cruising it that way is fair. A speed route is a different shape. Lady Lor's 2025 GPS track measured about 4,650 miles; White Lightning's about 4,280; Youens' actual 2025 route about 4,800. Bysiewicz covered 5,255 because a ski cannot cut the same corners offshore. When two record times are compared, the distances behind them often differ by several hundred miles.
What ended the Youens attempt
The 2026 boat was built for the job: a custom Weldbilt 2370MV, 23 feet with a 7′8″ beam, a 140 hp Tohatsu on a 25-inch shaft (some outlets reported 120 hp), extra ribs, triple full-length keelsons, an overbuilt box-tube transom with double knees, and an ice skid on the centre keel for hitting logs at speed on the rivers. An enclosed sleeping compartment let one man rest while the other drove, which is what makes 24-hour running possible.
Seven days in, the pace was there: roughly 2,417 miles in 6 days 22 hours, averaging 14.5 mph against the 14.7 the outright record demanded. Then, running down Lake Erie on 20 July, the welds began to fail. Boaters following the attempt reported three cracked welds at the ribs and a split chine weld about three feet long, with daylight visible through the hull and water coming in. They diverted into Erie and trailered the boat to a welding shop.
Hernden announced it himself: “After a great run, we have some bad news for you guys. Robert and I have decided to call off the remainder of our loop run.” Cruising Odyssey later reported the boat had struck an object on Lake Erie; Youens has not published a post-mortem.
The lesson the season taught about hulls
Every ended run in 2026 stopped for a physical reason, not a navigational one. Youens and Hernden lost a hull. Capt. Jason Decker ended on 12 August after being struck by a jumping fish and taken to urgent care. The Freedom Fighter crew dropped out of record contention with a back injury and finished the Loop anyway, 22 August.
Aluminium welded for fishing loads is not welded for 4,000 miles of pounding at 30 mph, and that is the difference between a boat that can do the speed and a boat that can hold it. The two records that fell in September were set on a 26-foot RIB and a personal watercraft: hull forms built to be hit by water continuously.
What Youens still holds
The 19d 13h 1m from July 2025 remains the fastest Great Loop ever run in a jon boat, and it was the solo and single-engine record for thirteen months. He ran it completely alone, at 71, in a 16-foot flat-bottom boat weighing 539 pounds rigged, on a single 60 hp outboard, with seven 12-gallon tanks giving roughly 800 miles of range.
The run included a 400-mile open-Gulf passage as much as 100 miles offshore, ten-foot seas in the Gulf Stream, a riprap strike near Cape Canaveral that broke his autopilot mount, which he repaired with wire salvaged from a notebook, and a 33 mph grounding on the ICW near Georgetown, South Carolina that threw the boat more than thirty feet into the trees. He transited 64 locks.
There is an honest asterisk on the new solo mark, and the tracking site that follows these runs states it plainly: Bysiewicz had a teammate riding alongside on a second ski for most of the Loop, and finished the last leg alone. Whether that is a solo record or a single-engine record with a support rider is being argued now.
How these records work
There is no sanctioning body. Crews declare a start line, run the Loop and cross their own wake at the same spot, and prove it with a public satellite tracker — usually Garmin inReach, posting a fix every ten minutes. David Fries' 2024 PWC time is the exception, ratified by Guinness. Bysiewicz's ratification is pending.
Youens put the standard in his own words: “I don't do Guinness World Records… That's the beauty of the internet and trackers and stuff. I got several people that can vouch for what we did, and it's kind of an honour thing.”
The practical consequence for anyone following an attempt: the numbers are only as good as the track. When a tracker goes offline mid-run, as Youens' 2026 data later did, the elapsed distance becomes a matter of reconstruction rather than record.
Watching the next one
The 2026 season is over: seven runs, three new records, all of them finished by 18 September. Attempts cluster between mid-July and mid-September, when the Great Lakes and the Gulf are both workable, and the planning behind it is serious. Youens spent six months on a ten-year weather analysis to thread Lake Michigan's north-south fetch and the Gulf crossing in the same run.
If you want to see the Loop rather than race it, the same waterway rewards the slow version: most Loopers take about a year, and the inland rivers these crews pass at 30 mph are the ones people spend days on. The Mississippi leg alone carries scheduled riverboat voyages along much of the route the record runs use.
Facts and times above come from the crews' own trackers and published reporting, compiled at greatlooprecord.site, WKRG Mobile, Cruising Odyssey, Texas Monthly and Power & Motoryacht, checked 22 September 2026.