At 11:05 a.m. CDT on Friday, September 18, 2026 White Lightning ran back past the Kentucky Dam tailwater she had left at 1:14 p.m. on September 6, closing the Loop in 11 days, 21 hours and 51 minutes — 20 hours 19 minutes under Lady Lor's 12d 18h 10m, the outright record that had stood since July 2025. Their tracker logged ~4,280 miles, a 15.0 mph average with every fuel stop, lock and night included; on the move they averaged about 22 mph, and they were stopped for roughly 85 of the 286 hours.
The run, day by day (tracker miles, CDT days): Sep 6 Kentucky Lake → Tenn-Tom, 208 · Sep 7 Tenn-Tom → Mobile → the Gulf, 365 · Sep 8 Florida Panhandle and the Big Bend, 407 · Sep 9 Tampa Bay → Fort Myers → across Florida on the Okeechobee Waterway to Stuart, 497 · Sep 10 the Atlantic ICW and coast, 491 · Sep 11 Carolinas → Chesapeake, 542 · Sep 12 Delaware, New Jersey coast, New York Harbor and the Hudson, 115 · Sep 13 Erie Canal, 121 · Sep 14 Erie Canal to Middleport, 78 · Sep 15 Buffalo, Lake Erie, the Detroit River and Lake Huron, 419 · Sep 16 Mackinac and Lake Michigan, 510 · Sep 17 Chicago, the Illinois River and the Mississippi, 370 · Sep 18 the Ohio to Paducah and home up the Tennessee, 248.
Every 10-minute satellite fix is archived and tappable on the home-page map, with Lady Lor's 2025 run drawn alongside for comparison. The record is unsanctioned, like every Great Loop mark bar one: a fixed start line, a public tracker, and the wake crossing on the clock. It goes in the record book as the outright record.
Two Louisville-area captains, one 26-foot rigid inflatable, and the fastest mark in the sport — which is now theirs. Capt. Dustin Kidd — who ran the whole Great Loop in 2018 and turned that trip into a Highfield dealership — and Capt. Marc Crutcher, a sailmaker and marina owner from the Ohio River, shoved off from Kentucky Lake on Sunday, September 6 aboard White Lightning, a 2027 Highfield Sport 800 with twin Yamaha 200s and nearly 300 gallons of fuel in bladders. "Topping off before launch, the clock will start in a bit," Crutcher posted that morning. With two aboard, the mark that applied was the big one: Lady Lor's 12 days, 18 hours, 10 minutes, the outright Great Loop record. Twelve days later it was theirs.
Their position beamed in by satellite every 10 minutes for the whole run. It's plotted on our home-page map alongside a ghost of Lady Lor's real 2025 pace, replayed from White Lightning's own start — so you can see, hour by hour, where the record was won. The crew's own tracker page, with a fuel fund and a virtual barrel head to sign, is at bourboncitymc.com/loop-tracker, and they post from the boat in the public Facebook group Great Loop 2026 White Lightning.
Kidd completed the Great Loop in 2018, before his 39th birthday: 333 days and roughly 6,124 nautical miles aboard Knot Kidd'n, a 1989 50-foot Chris-Craft Constellation, departing November 17, 2017 and returning October 13, 2018. Al Roker interviewed the crew on NBC's Today show mid-Loop. The trip convinced him the tender matters as much as the mother ship, and in June 2020 he and partner Bob Missi opened Bourbon City Yacht Tenders — now Bourbon City Marine Center — a Highfield dealership in Louisville, Kentucky that bills itself as "the Midwest's Highfield headquarters" and an AGLCA lifetime member and sponsor. This is his second Loop, and the first one against the clock.
Crutcher owns Unbridled Sailing, a Louisville sail loft and rigging shop founded in 2008 (sails, rigging, electronics, restoration and sailing lessons across Kentucky, Indiana and Tennessee), and runs Juniper Beach Marina on the Ohio River at Prospect, Kentucky — the boat's home water. He sent the tip that put this run on the site: "Dustin and I are doing it. Launching today finally."
| Boat | 2027 Highfield Sport 800 (Highfield Boats North America) — aluminum-hull rigid inflatable, 26′ 8″ LOA, 9′ 7″ beam, hardtop |
| Power | Twin Yamaha 200 hp outboards — 400 hp on a 26-foot RIB |
| Fuel | ~300 gallons aboard, 260–280 usable: the 66-gallon in-hull tank plus two flexible fuel bladders the crew added for the run — 80 gallons in the bow locker and 150 gallons aft. That is the whole strategy: the stock Sport 800 is a 66-gallon boat, so the bladders roughly quadruple the range between fuel docks. |
| Navigation & electronics | Simrad ultra-wide displays with radar (on a custom Nautical Creations mount) · one Garmin MFD · VHF with AIS · an iPad running Argo Navigation for routing |
| Night running | Black Oak LED Nitron XD infrared night-vision camera and a FLIR thermal camera — the kit that lets a small boat keep moving on the rivers after dark |
| Connectivity | Starlink Mini aboard, plus the satellite tracker reporting every 10 minutes |
| Performance | Highfield quotes a ~27 mph cruise for a stock Sport 800; the tracker showed 36.5 mph out of Kentucky Lake and 43 mph on the Tenn-Tom on day 2 |
| Crew | Two — Kidd and Crutcher, sharing the helm |
| Start / finish | Kentucky Lake, at the Kentucky Dam end (Gilbertsville, KY) — where they crossed their wake on Sep 18 |
| Direction | Rivers first: up the Tennessee to Pickwick and the Tenn-Tom, Mobile, the Gulf, Florida, the Atlantic, the Great Lakes, then the Illinois, Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee back to Kentucky Lake |
There's no two-person category on the Loop. A crewed boat runs in the outright class, and the outright record was Lady Lor's 12d 18h 10m — Peter Hajas and a crew of four on a 40-foot Contender with triple 350s, July 2025. That's a ~4,650-mile loop at about 15 mph including every stop. A 26-foot RIB with two people aboard — 400 hp against 1,050, and fuel bladders where Lady Lor had 430 built-in gallons — is a very different tool for the job than a 40-foot centre console with three engines. What it does have is the full night-running kit (infrared and thermal cameras, radar) that lets it keep moving after dark, which is where Lady Lor won her record.
Before the launch the crew's own pages described the run as "Captain Dustin's Great Loop" and a second Loop attempt, without naming a target time or a record. They ran a timed satellite tracker from a fixed start line, Crutcher's launch post said "the clock will start," and on Sep 18 the crew posted the official time: 11d 21h 51m, finished at 12:05 p.m. EDT / 11:05 a.m. CDT. This site measured the run against the outright mark throughout — the only category a two-person crew fits — and that is the record it now holds.
Fans asked during the run, so here is exactly what each figure on the White Lightning card was and where it came from. The card is now frozen at the finish.
| Position & track | The crew's satellite tracker reports a fix roughly every 10 minutes; their site publishes the list of fixes plus the time and speed of the newest one. We read that feed every 5 minutes during the run and drew the white line through the fixes; every fix is archived, so the track stays on the map. |
| Timestamps on the track | The crew's feed only carries a time for the latest fix, so from Sep 9 we archive every new fix with the time it appears — tap any dot on the track for the time, speed and miles at that point. For fixes before we started archiving (the first ~2½ days) the times are interpolated between fixes we did observe, and are marked with ≈ — treat them as accurate to a few minutes, not to the minute. |
| Speed (last fix) | The speed the crew's tracker reported at its latest fix. |
| 1-hr and 2-hr avg | Distance covered over the fixes in the last 60 / 120 minutes, divided by the time between the first and last of those fixes. It ends at the newest fix, so if they have been tied up for two hours it reads low, as it should. |
| Run avg | Tracker miles ÷ time since the 1:14 p.m. CDT Sep 6 start. Stops included — this is the number that decides the record. |
| Three kinds of "miles" | Tracker miles add up straight lines between 10-minute fixes, so they cut every bend and read low on winding rivers (about 14% low on the Tennessee). Route miles are how far along Lady Lor's real 2025 GPS loop they are, measured from Kentucky Dam — a few percent under charted distance because her track is fixes joined up too. Charted miles (Corps of Engineers mile markers) run higher than both; by those, Kentucky Dam to Demopolis is about 426 miles. We show tracker and route miles because they can be measured the same way for both boats; when a fan wants "real" distance, use the charted figure. |
| The record loop — 4,652 mi | The length of Lady Lor's own 2025 record route as drawn from her GPS fixes. It is the loop a record boat actually runs — not the ~6,000-mile guidebook Loop that includes side trips — and because it is fix-based it undercounts a little; her charted route is probably nearer 4,850–4,900 (Youens' 2025 route was ~4,800; Bandit's 2026 tracker logged 4,884). |
| The dial (ahead / behind) | We take White Lightning's position, find the matching mile on Lady Lor's loop from the Kentucky Dam start, and ask: how long did Lady Lor take to get this far from this same point? The difference between her elapsed time and theirs is the dial reading. It is her real, hour-by-hour pace — not an average — replayed from their start line and their start time. Lady Lor ran the Tenn-Tom and Gulf on a failed centre engine, so her pace through the first ~1,600 route miles is slower than her Atlantic and Great Lakes legs; a lead built early on can shrink later even at the same speed. |
| Why the lead jumped ~16 hours at Okeechobee (Sep 9) | The dial always compares the same stretch of the loop — Kentucky Dam to wherever White Lightning was at that moment — never Lady Lor's first three days from Islamorada. Lady Lor ran the long way round the bottom of Florida: Sanibel → Cape Sable → the Keys → Miami → Stuart, about 321 route miles in 16½ hours. White Lightning crossed the state on the Okeechobee Waterway instead — both are legitimate Loop routes; picking the short one is strategy, exactly like a record boat choosing the Tenn-Tom. At 8:47 a.m. CDT on Sep 9, mid-lake, the nearest point on Lady Lor's loop flipped from the Gulf side (route mile 1,131) to the Atlantic side (mile 1,452), so the dial credited them with her 16½ hours in one step and the lead went from ~14½ h to ~31 h. The step is instant but the gain is real: Sanibel to Stuart took Lady Lor ~19 h and White Lightning ~7 h (including a stop at the Franklin Lock), a net ~12 h banked once the crossing was done. Two side-effects: while they were 60+ miles from either side of her route on the lake the dial was momentarily meaningless, and "miles along the record route" now includes ~320 Keys miles they never ran — which is why it reads higher than their tracker odometer. The record is a clock, not an odometer, so that is the right thing to count. |
| Projected finish | Record time minus their current lead (or plus their deficit). Deliberately conservative — it assumes they hold Lady Lor's pace from here, not their own current speed. |
| Odds to break it | A curve on the ahead/behind figure whose confidence grows as the loop completes: the same 5-hour lead means little on day 1 and nearly everything on the last day. Held near 50/50 for the first day by design. |
During the run everything above recomputed every 5 minutes from the crew's public feed; since 11:05 a.m. CDT Sep 18 it is frozen on the official 11d 21h 51m. Spot something that doesn't add up? Tell us.
Nine partners, per the crew's tracker page:
| Highfield Boats | The boat itself |
| Yamaha Marine | The power behind it |
| CSE Marine Products | NeverSoft™ keeps the tubes topped up |
| Nautical Creations | The custom radar mount |
| Juniper Beach Marina | Home waters |
| Unbridled Sailing | Sailing lessons & rigging |
| Glow Script Marquee | The send-off lights |
| Bourbon City Emergency Response | Watching from shore |
| GOAT502 Digital | The website & the tracker |
Fans can chip in through the crew's "Fuel the Voyage" shop — a beer for the crew ($6), a gallon of fuel ($15) or a mile of the Loop ($25) — and sign the virtual barrel head, a nod to the real one friends and fellow Loopers signed on Kidd's 2018 trip.
This page went up the day the run launched (Sep 6, 2026) and was rewritten at the finish. It's built from the crew's tip, their tracker page and Facebook group, the official time the crew posted on Sep 18, Highfield's published account of Kidd's 2018 Loop, and public business records for Unbridled Sailing and Juniper Beach Marina. The boat, fuel and electronics details come from the crew's own "The boat…" post in their Facebook group (Sep 6). On Sep 17, with the finish in sight, FOX 32 Chicago ran a segment with both captains. Photos, the crew's own account of the run and any further coverage are welcome — send them in.