📣 UPDATE!: It’s March 2021, and we are going to go around again! YES, for reals! 😃. WHY NOT!? 🛥 🌀
When we started out on our first loop in 2018, we flew a white AGLCA burgee on our bow, indicating that we had not yet completed the loop. When we “crossed our wake” (got back to our starting point, loop completed), we switched out to fly a gold burgee indicating we’d completed the loop once. We proudly fly it now. The next time we cross our wake, which we think will be around the end of November 2021, we’ll earn a Platinum burgee. So, this time around we are considered Gold Loopers, and this loop trip is actually referred to doing our Platinum Loop. Just sharing some inside lingo with you. 😉
Below is an explanation of what the Loop is. See our first blog entry for our Platinum loop to see what we have planned!
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2018: We had been himing and hawing about whether we should embark on this boat journey called The Great Loop. It has been on Kenny’s bucket list for several years, but in really thinking about it, neither of us were just passionately dying about doing it. What is it? It is a journey around the eastern United States, by boat! Here’s the map:
The map shows a few options, but for us, we would start from our home on the west coast of Florida in early Spring. Go across the state to the east coast, and follow the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway up to Chesapeake Bay. Up, around, and up the Atlantic to New York City. Follow the Hudson river (half way up), and turn left at the Erie Canal. After 185 miles of the 340 miles of the Erie Canal, turn north on the Oswego canal up to Lake Ontario. Cross the eastern end of the lake up to Canada. Go west through the Trent Severn Waterway to the Georgian Bay and then the North Channel. (There is another route that follows the southern shore of Lake Erie, then up Lake Huron which stays in the U.S., but our boat can go in the shallower waters of the Trent Severn, so we’ve chosen to go north into Canada.) Drop back into the U.S. at the western end of Lake Huron at Mackinac Michigan, and cruise down the eastern shore of Lake Michigan all the way to Chicago. From there, follow a series of inland rivers 1300 miles to Mobile Alabama: The Illinois, Upper Mississippi, the Ohio, Cumberland, Tennessee, Tenn-Tom Waterway, and Black Warrior-Tombigbee Waterway. From Mobile, follow the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway across the Florida panhandle, then drop down and cross the northeast curve of the Gulf back to the Tampa area, and back home to Sarasota.
Total miles (depending upon side trips) is in the 5600 range. We intend to spend at least 3 weeks in Chesapeake Bay, including 100 miles up the Potomac River to Washington DC, and a journey up the Delaware to Philadelphia. And then if weather and time permits, a side trip 100 miles up the Cumberland River to Nashville.
Timing is to Spring up the Atlantic coast in the spring. The New York Canal system usually opens in May, but the Hudson River can have a lot of debris, so don’t really want to start up that river until the first of June or so. Spend the summer in Canada and Great Lakes, with the aim to be to Chicago by mid-September. Then Fall down the rivers in the fall, before it gets too cold. Then after hurricane season ends, spend the winter in the South… Florida or the Bahamas. So for us, it looks like mid-March to mid-November = 8 months, which equals on average, about 160 miles a week.
That is a lot of travelling and planning: watching weather & tides, navigating narrow and shallow waterways, traversing open ocean (Atlantic and Gulf), entering and safely docking in a couple hundred new marinas, anchoring out, transiting over 100 locks, staying out of the way of commercial barges on the rivers, and living on our boat for 8 months! We’ve heard ‘Loopers’ say that when they are done, they are so thankful that they did it, and then that they really enjoy how relaxing life is when you don’t have to pay attention to all that technical stuff day after day.
So … we went to a “Looper-Palooza” in November to learn more, and to network with loopers who have completed the Loop, those that are currently doing it, and others that are planning, like us. That pretty much sealed it for us. Let’s go! Let’s to this!
Everyone who is doing the Loop (at least 100 boats per year in the AGLCA) is on the basic same schedule because of the weather – Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. So we will always have other members somewhere around us, and there are ‘Harbor Host’ members that live all along the way that are eager to offer assistance/advice. If we are ever going to do it, what are we waiting for? We have a great boat to do it in. We live in a perfect place to start & end. And we have so many resources and so much support available to us through the AGLCA and other forums. And if anything happens, we’re still in the U.S./Canada, so never far from services. And fuel, groceries, and water are way more accessible and reasonably priced than they were in the Bahamas. No sweat! Stay tuned!
Oh my ….. how do we even begin to get ready for this adventure?