ICW News doesn't generate facts. It gathers them. Every briefing, card, gauge reading, and notice on this site traces back to a named, checkable source — and almost all of it is information the U.S. government already publishes for mariners. This page explains where that information comes from, how we choose it, and how we keep it honest.
Three questions govern everything we publish: Who said it? Can you check it yourself? And would we stand behind it on the water?
The backbone of ICW News is the operational record the federal government keeps for people on the water — the National Weather Service for marine forecasts, the Coast Guard for notices to mariners and the rules of the road, the Army Corps of Engineers for lock status and river bulletins, and NOAA's tides, currents, and Coast Pilots for the route itself. These sources are authoritative, public domain, and built for operational use. When you read a forecast or a lock delay here, it came from them.
On top of the federal record we add the high-value public material that experienced cruisers rely on: state boating-safety guides, canal and waterway authority bulletins, the NOAA chart catalog, and the published navigation references that document bridges, channels, and local conditions. These fill in the local texture the national forecasts can't — the inlet that steepens on an outgoing tide, the bascule that opens on the half hour.
We also read the cruising press, the Looper community, and the conversations captains have with each other. That reading shapes what we choose to cover — it tells us what people actually worry about and want to understand. But it is never the source of a fact. We learn the question from the community and answer it from the authoritative record.
A mile marker, a bridge clearance, a lock dimension, a channel number — these are facts, and facts belong to everyone. We extract them from authoritative documents and present them in our own words, cited by name and, wherever possible, linked to the original so you can check it yourself. We don't republish other people's writing, and we don't pass along a fact from a source we can't stand behind.
Some numbers can put a boat in danger if they're wrong. Bridge clearances, lock dimensions, channel depths, and aid-to-navigation positions are drawn only from primary navigation authorities — the Army Corps, the Coast Pilot, and NOAA charts — never estimated, never inferred, and never generated. If we can't source a safety-critical number to an authority, we don't print it.
We use AI for narrow, supporting work — drafting a forecast sentence from NOAA text, sorting incoming items, suggesting a card from material we've already approved. It never makes a safety call, never invents a fact, and never publishes on its own. A person reviews editorial content before it goes out. The one exception is trusted government data — Coast Guard notices and NOAA feeds publish as issued, because they're authoritative at the source.
We show our sources because the route belongs to the people running it — and the best captains never stop checking the original.