Thinking Seriously About Doing the Great Loop

[Chinook]

Hi Jim,

Good to hear from you. Sounds like you have a great place to live, right on one of our country's great waterways, and with lots of sailing and cruising options. As I've posted earlier, we were compelled to postpone our Great Loop departure. We'd hoped to get underway this past September, however, family responsibilities have altered those plans. It doesn't look like we'll be free to go until next fall at the earliest. When we do take off, I'll update here, and I do plan on posting an account of the trip on our webpage.

[mastreb]

The Admiral and I are talking about doing half of the great loop in small chunks over the course of five years. The very tentative plan would be to buy the second boat we're talking about for the east coast from Bill at Boats-4-Sail in Milwaukee, and then go clockwise: Great lakes, Eire canal, up to New England & Cape cod, and then south down the ICW to florida and the gulf of Mexico. At the end of the trip, we would make a decision regarding where to homeport the boat, having been through all those sailing venues.

The river portion is not particularly interesting to either one of us at this point, as we wouldn't be able to sail much, so that makes clockwise an option.

We would go out every summer, spending mid-june through mid-august on the boat, and then store it at each stop over during the winter until we could come back the next year.

Bunch of legal complexity in that we would technically be required to register the boat everywhere we left it, but the Admiral is pretty good at that kind of paperwork.