How Bow and Transom is made

Once a week, on Thursday morning

Bow and Transom is a weekly for recreational boaters, published by WeldonPC.com. Early on Thursday a program on our server gathers that week's public sources, an AI model drafts one article per section from them, and an automatic fact check decides whether the issue can go out. Each issue covers one week, from Monday; it is numbered and kept in the archive.

The sources

• Federal Register: the U.S. Coast Guard's documents of the past seven days that touch recreational boating, such as safety zones for fireworks and regattas, drawbridge schedules and special local regulations. Security zones, cargo and commercial-vessel rules are left out.
• NOAA CO-OPS: Great Lakes water levels at one station per lake (Duluth, Milwaukee, Harbor Beach, Cleveland, Oswego): thirteen monthly means and the latest reading, in feet above IGLD 1985, exactly as NOAA gives them.
• National Weather Service: the open-lake forecast for each Great Lake, from forecast.weather.gov. The weekly quotes each synopsis word for word with the time it was issued, and never makes or retells a forecast of its own.
• U.S. Coast Guard boating safety recall list: recalls opened in the past 60 days, with the facts in the list (number, company, model name, date).
• National Marine Manufacturers Association (NMMA): news for boaters, such as boat shows and access to the water. NMMA's texts are used only in an issue an editor at WeldonPC.com reads and approves before it goes out; an issue that publishes by itself leaves them out. They are summarized in other words with a link; a quote is word for word, at most 25 words and credited.

Every request names Bow and Transom and waits its turn: one request every two seconds per site, at most sixty per run and at most six runs a week, and only where a site's robots.txt allows automated readers. Some ask them to stay away (as of October 2026, the National Weather Service alert feed and the USGS water data service), so the weekly carries no alert counts or river gauges until that changes. Each response is kept with the time it was fetched and a fingerprint (SHA-256), so any issue can be checked again later.

The writing

An AI model (gemma4:e4b) running on WeldonPC's own AI server writes the articles of This Week on the Water, Safety & Rules, Gear & Maintenance and Events. It sees only that section's sources, and for every sentence it must quote the passage it relies on, word for word. No reader data is sent to it.

The Great Lakes & Inland article is not written by the model at all. Code writes one sentence per lake from NOAA's numbers and quotes each National Weather Service synopsis as issued, with its time; the article says "Built by code from the sources listed, no AI". Code, not the model, does all the arithmetic: a change in a lake's level is computed from NOAA's two numbers, in feet as NOAA gives them and in inches rounded to one decimal, and the source list shows the formula. The tables and the gauge chart on the front page come straight from the sources.

The fact check

Before anything is published, code checks every sentence against the passages it cites:

• Each number, date, weekday and time of day must appear there exactly, nothing rounded, and stay with the same unit, the same word, the same direction (higher or lower) and the same month as in the passage. A number must come from a source that names the place or body the sentence puts it next to.
• Each name must appear there, or in the cited document's own title, summary line or publisher.
• Words of negation, status, safety, size and certainty (such as not, closed, allowed, safe, sharp, all, can) must come from the passage, and a "no", "not", "unless" or "prohibited" in the passage must stay in the sentence.
• A quote, in double or single quotation marks, must be word for word, at most 25 words, and credited to the speaker the source names next to it. A person's words appear only as such a quote. Nobody is quoted as "officials", "owners" or "operators".
• Advice must be the kind the source gives ("should" is not "must"), and no sentence may start with an instruction the source does not give.
• Relative times such as "tomorrow" or "later this week" are not allowed, because the issue comes out after the sources were written.
• A headline is one to three short parts, each drawn from one source, so it cannot join two items into a claim neither makes.
• NMMA's own words appear only inside a credited quote.

An article that fails gets one rewrite; if it still fails, it is not published. A forecast older than a day is never published: the week is run again from fresh sources instead.

The check is narrow on purpose. It confirms that the words that carry facts are in the sources and sit where the sources put them; it does not understand the text, so a sentence can pass and still read a source differently than you would. We test it with deliberately false sentences made from real sources, and it stops every one we have tried; that is a test, not a guarantee. Each article lists its sources, with links, and the U.S. government ones with an archived copy of the exact text used, so you can read them yourself. Articles summarise public sources; they are not official notices or forecasts. Check the official source before you go out; the official text governs.

Publishing

If every article passes, the issue publishes by itself on Thursday morning, unless the editor has set every issue to wait for a reading first. If any article fails, or the AI server cannot be reached, the whole issue waits for an editor at WeldonPC.com, who can approve it, publish only the articles that passed, ask for a new draft, run the week again from fresh sources, or drop the issue. Nobody edits the model's text by hand to make it pass. A section with nothing new in its sources that week is left out, never padded.

Corrections

Spotted an error? Tell us through weldonpc.com/contact, with the issue number and the sentence. An article that is withdrawn says so, with the date.

Every article says so

Each article written by the model carries the line "Written with AI from the sources listed" (the code-built Great Lakes & Inland article says "Built by code from the sources listed, no AI"), a numbered source list with the publisher, the title, the source's own date and the time it was fetched, and no person's byline: the articles are credited to Bow and Transom.