Our Great Loop Adventure

Introduction:

I have been dreaming and planning on doing the Great Loop for a very long time. I think I remember first hearing about the “Great Loop” on one of our family boat trips during a summer vacation. I was admiring a large boat that was docked near our family’s sailboat. I must have been drooling, because the owner came out on the dock and we began to talk. He explained that he and his wife were “Loopers.” They invited our family aboard after dinner. The kids were fascinated that their boat had a video recorder and they had a collection of movies to watch in the evening. While the children watched a cartoon, he explained what the loop was. By the time he finished I was hooked.  Sharon just smiled and promptly figured it was something that I would either forget about or come to my senses later. Well, I didn’t. During the school year, in the evening while checking the several sets of papers I had to correct nightly I would pause and imagine making this trip. It was always blue skies and calm seas.  I’d sometimes casually mention the “Great Loop” during our dinner discussions and Sharon and the kids would chalk up this crazy talk as a middle aged man’s dream that he would eventually get over. But it just wouldn’t get out of my mind.

  Several years later I discovered a book entitled Honey, Let’s Get a Boat… by Ron and Eva Stob and purchased it. After I read the book I was even more convinced I wanted to do this after we retired. I asked my better half, Sharon, to read it to have her see that this adventure was doable.  Well, she began to read it but somehow the book was lost or misplaced. (Sharon still claims that someone took it out of her car.) I found it a few of days later on the side of the house rain soaked.  I suddenly realized that convincing Sharon to take this trip was going to be harder than I first thought.  But as anyone who knows me will tell you I am determined and can be relentless when I want something.  It took several years and many deals and promises to convince Sharon, we could pull this off.  Reluctant at first, Sharon has become enthusiastic about the trip and sees her role as the one who will force me to slow down and stop and enjoy the sights along the way.

Preparing for the Loop:

We began preparing to do the loop soon after we retired. We realized that the boat we owned would not be a good choice for doing extended cruising. It had twin gas engines that allowed us to travel at 13 knots but Polly and Stella (the engine names) burned almost 13 gallons of fuel an hour.  We would set a budget for fuel and when we reached halfway on the fuel budget, we turned around and came home.  Our trips were a usually a week to ten days. Remember we were both retired school teachers, no unlimited fuel budget for us.  We used the boat primarily as a cottage with one or two trips each summer.  But this wouldn’t work for the Great Loop. The distance for doing the loop is anywhere from 5000 miles to 7000 miles depending on the route you chose and the many side trips that can be taken.  No we both agreed that we needed a more economical boat for the loop.  It became my job to find the perfect boat for the trip. We soon discovered that there is no perfect boat for the loop. We loved our Mainship. Mainship built a style called a fast trawler.  It seemed perfect for us.  It was 39 feet long, 14 feet wide and had a draft of 3 feet 8 inches.  The model was built with either single or twin diesel engines. I decided we would be willing to go slower but burn less fuel. Sharon wasn’t so sure at first, but after reading that many of the boats doing the loop travel less than 9 miles an hour, she agreed that it made probably made sense.  

               

She loved the layout of the boat. It has a nice size owner’s stateroom and grandkid’s stateroom allowed for either one or two grandchildren to sleep aboard should they decide they wanted to stay the night. The main cabin was cozy and I wanted an inside helm if the weather got nasty.  She really liked the spiral staircase to the fly bridge rather than the ladder we had on our Mainship, but what really sold her was the deep walkways on both sides of the boat. She knew she would feel perfectly safe when on the deck in bad weather.  Now all we had to do was sell our old Mainship. We contacted my best friend’s son in law who was a broker and before we were really ready we sold our boat. We were boatless. The search for the new boat could officially begin.

 The search began on the internet.  The web site that I used had over forty Mainship 350/390’s listed for sale.  They were built from as early as 1998 to one built in 2006. There were single engines and twin engines. In addition they were for sale all over the United States and the world. We decided that we would begin our search in Florida. (We spend the month of February in Florida ever since we retired.) We agreed that we would spend one day each week looking at Mainships.  We contacted a broker in Florida who had a boat listed on the web site I was using.  I called him and he said he had several Mainships for sale along the Gulf Coast of Florida. One day each week we would check out one or two different boats. They were all Mainship 350/390s. As we searched, Sharon and I began to make a list of things that we felt we wanted on the boat and those things we didn’t.  On the drive back from visiting one boat that was in really poor shape, Sharon declared that the boat had to be built in the 21^st century. “Don’t show me any boats made before 2000,” she stated firmly. By the end of February, I realized that buying a boat in Florida and bringing it back to Michigan was not a great idea. Any money I would save in the cost of the boat would be spent bringing it home.  We would continue the search in Michigan.

When we got home, I got back on the internet.  There were several Mainships for sale in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Ontario, Canada.  Sharon made another pronouncement. “I’m not going on any boat that is stored outside until all the snow melts. Until then I’ll only look at boats that are in a heated building.” So whenever I called a broker about a boat, the first question was, “Is it stored inside?” If the broker said it was stored outside, I politely told him I would call again when the weather warmed up. Two brokers in Ohio told me the boats they had listed were stored inside. In fact, later, we realized they were less than 75 feet apart.  We picked one, made an offer and after some negotiating our offer was accepted. We were no longer boatless and we had “our perfect boat” to do the Great Loop.

Finding the perfect boat was an important step but preparing ourselves for the Loop was our number one priority.  You have to understand that both Sharon and I were teachers. Neither one of us had grown up around boats nor do either of us have our captains’ licenses. We had taken a sailing class after we bought our first sailboat and were comfortable taking it out on weekends and on short vacations with our children. When we decided we were going to do the loop, we knew we both needed more training. Taking the boat out for a day sail or a series of day sails in fair weather was one thing but spending a month or more on the boat in all kinds of weather was quite another.  One of the teachers at the school I taught at had for many years encouraged me to join the United States Power Squadron. The main purpose of USPS is to educate people on boat handling, navigation and safe boating practices.  We became members and began taking classes to prepare ourselves for our adventure.  In addition, they offered seminars that enabled Sharon and I to believe we really could pull this crazy dream of mine off.  We attended monthly meetings that began with guest speakers who were involved with boating. We also joined both the Great Lakes Cruising Club (GLCC) and American Great Loop Cruising Association (AGLCA).  Both groups helped us to gain the knowledge we felt we needed to safely complete our adventure.

I brought the boat to Belle Maer, our home port, on Lake St Clair in May of 2011. That summer we spent three weeks cruising up the Michigan side of Lake Huron to Mackinac Island and back. I was learning how to dock the boat with a single engine and bow thruster and use the electronics that came with the boat. Sharon was learning how to anticipate problems I would have docking and tell (not ask) dock attendants which lines she wanted tied to which cleats on the dock. We harbor hopped, that is we travelled from one city marina to another always skipping at least one marina to visit on the way back. We met several people who were on the Great Loop and asked a lot of questions. After the trip we had learned the strengths and weaknesses of both ourselves and our vessel.  We realized that we had never anchored over night. We felt we would have no problem doing the loop as long as we could always find a marina to spend the night. We didn’t think that would be possible in a 6000 mile year long journey. We decided that we would have to take a trip somewhere and spend several nights on the hook. We would need to run the generator (which we only turned on to make sure it worked) while on the hook and discover what electrical equipment we should use and how long under battery power. We needed another long trip before we would be ready for the loop.

We planned a month cruise on Georgian Bay. Two couples we knew from the Birmingham Power Squadron had offered to travel with us for a few days to show us different anchorages they had used in the past and how to survive on the hook for several days at a time. Then life got in the way. First, one couple’s boat was destroyed in a fire over the winter. They weren’t going to be able to go cruising without a boat. The other couple decided that they weren’t even going to launch their boat that summer because of a needed surgery and several out of state commitments. We were being forced to learn these things on our own, by trial and error.  We harbor hopped up the Canadian side of Lake Huron to Tobermory.  After a weekend in Tobermory we began our anchoring training. At our first anchorage, it took three tries to successfully set the anchor.  First, we snagged a submerged railroad tie. Next, the anchor dragged in the gravel until we were in water too close to shore and water too shallow to for me to sleep comfortably at night. The third time was the charm. Unfortunately, the nylon roller on the anchor roller broke off so I had to wrap a rag around the metal shaft and secured it with a couple of cable ties.  The next time we anchored it only took two tries to set the hook. The first time the anchor held but I was worried we were too close to a sailboat which was already anchored. We moved and everything went well with that anchoring. Maybe anchoring wasn’t as hard as we had imagined it to be.

After the second anchorage, anchoring became easier for both Sharon and me.  We each had our assigned tasks and dropping the hook became almost routine.  A fellow cruiser once told me that BOAT is an acronym for Break Out Another Thousand. We were going to find out how true that phrase was. At the third anchorage our dinghy motor decided to die.  The engine would run but the propeller would not spin. The outboard was over twenty years old and the butt of many jokes at our marina. It was referred to as “the old eggbeater.” Sharon made another declaration. “You are not going to put any more money in that old outboard, when we get home buy a new one.” So no outboard meant that we would either have to stay on the boat or row to shore. “Oh well, rowing would be good exercise.”  Next, the impeller on the generator decided to disintegrate.  No electricity on our boat meant no more anchoring until it was fixed. (No, I didn’t have a spare and yes, now we carry spares.) When we returned home Sharon and I made another list of things we knew we wanted before we left on the loop. Sharon wanted a sound shield on the generator to quiet it while she was in the main cabin preparing dinner and cleaning up.  She also wanted a small inverter so we could use the television, coffee pot and microwave without running the generator in the evening after dinner and in the morning before we would leave. My list of wants included a spare propeller for the boat and an ipad to be used as a backup for our GPS/Chart plotter.  This year BOAT would be spelled BOATT. (Break Out Another Ten Thousand) No one ever said doing the loop was going to be cheap.

The winter of 2012/2013 was more planning for the loop.  Sharon read two more books written by couples that had done the Great Loop.  I read one. We both read the daily blog provided by the AGLCA. Sharon started a notebook with information we got from people doing the Great Loop.  We took several webinars offered by the GLCC. These were wonderful; we would put on our pajamas, turn on the computer and learn from experts about more things that we needed to know. It was a great way to spend a cold winter’s night with nothing on TV. February was spent scouting different marinas on the Gulf Coast of Florida where hopefully we and Summer Recess  would spend much of the winter the following year.  Sharon ordered the Great Loop map for the grandkids to follow us on our journey and the white AGLCA pennant to fly from our radar mast. The sound shield, inverter, new prop and ipad were installed. The waiting was almost over.

We launched the boat the last Wednesday in April; it was cold, rainy and miserable.  The engine turned right over, but the battery on the generator decided it’s time had passed so I had to install a new starter battery. I moved the boat from the marina where we store the boat in the winter to Belle Maer, its summer home.  Sharon spent two days cleaning and arranging the inside of the boat. Another hiccup, the water pump for the air conditioner didn’t work so another call to our marine tech to figure out why it wasn’t working. We ordered two folding bikes to serve as our ground transportation. They will arrive in plenty of time to get used to folding and unfolding them.