This is book 7 of the "Rick Brant" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

Published as by "John Blaine", a house name. This is #7 in the series, according to Amazon.com.

A local fisherman runs his boat aground, hard. And despite a reputation for being sober and well-behaved, claims he was drunk. A local retired fisherman and the Spindrift boys, Rick Brant and his friend Scotty, start investigating. A friend is a reporter for a local newspaper, and they get interested to.

And then people start trying to scare the kids off. A shot is fired at Scotty from a bizarre air rifle (I suspect it has to appear again; it's too weird to just include gratuitously, I think it falls under the "gun on the mantlepiece" rule).

It kind of looks like smuggling is involved, and that the guy who ran aground was lured by faking the warning light. And that the people renting the abandoned hotel are probably involved.

Rick makes his first night flight (I'm not sure what the law was on that in 1950) out over the ocean to find the transfer of cargo, and succeeds. And takes movies with his infrared movie camera, as they also did of some unloading earlier. The other ship is too small to be ordinary smuggling, though, it's some kind of coaster. Has it in turn met up with a big ship further out? This is getting complicated, and the stakes may be going up. And the danger level.

But Rick is back on the ground safe, talking to the newspaper editor, and it sounds like they're invoking their link to the state police, so I think things are almost under control. Probably just time for one more sub-plot.

Ah, stuff was being smuggled out, not in; hence things didn't go quite as expected, so their predictions were off. Guns were being smuggled out.

They manage to put Jerry (the reporter) in serious jeopardy; well, mostly he does it himself, by following up a clue after things have been stirred up. Rick and Scotty actually go in and rescue him, and get rescued in turn by the retired Captain.

Which brings everything to a satisfactory windup.