Cruising MoonShine

Thanks to the efforts of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, starting in about 1826, there is a navigable waterway that circumnavigates the eastern third of the United States, from Maine to Florida by way of Illinois and Alabama.  Some of it is via the intracoastal waterway and some of it is by navigable rivers and lakes.  It’s called “The Great Loop” and it’s one of the few true adventures available in our modern society that doesn’t either risk your life, cost a fortune or violate the law.  (Not that I’m opposed to any of those but in general I try to avoid them.)  Basically you procure a boat suitable for living aboard and follow the intracoastal waterway and the river systems around while you follow the seasons.  Most people spend winter in the south portion, summer in the north going through the Great Lakes.  There is a Great Loop Association, a valuable resource, along with numerous books, all of which I’ve read every word of, and a dozen dozen websites and youtube videos.  Every problem you are thinking of right now has already been solved by people who have done this and then fortunately for us, written about it.  I’ve done some of it by sailboat on one trip or another, from Knoxville to Beaufort NC, but I was always bound for somewhere and didn’t slow down and experience the areas I passed through.  This time will be more leisurely.  After all, where does everyone go on vacation?  To the water’s edge!  So what better way to travel than along the edge of continent and sea?

“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing -absolutely nothing- half so much worth doing as simply messing about with boats.”

The short answer is, for most boats, about a year.

It’s 6200 miles or so around the Loop. If you travel 50 miles a day, (that’s five hours or less travel time) it takes 120 days to do the Loop, leaving 244 days for sightseeing, weather, etc. Two-thirds of your time is not traveling. So while it sounds like a lot, in reality that leaves plenty of time to go home for visits, sightsee, fix the boat, whatever comes up.

We don’t want to be away a full year without a break at home, so that will make a difference.  Until we start we just don’t know.  We are not committed to anything but an adventure.  So we’ll go for a while and when we get homesick or just need to get back for a bit we’ll park the boat in a marina and rent a car.  We both love where we live and the things we do around here, and we’ll miss our friends and family, so the question is wide open.  If we love it and want to stay on the boat and keep going, we’ll do that.  This is an adventure and an experiment at the same time.

“The ocean is the last wild, wild west. If they ever figure out a way to populate the sea and bring their strip malls, highways and troubles out here, people like us will be building fiberglass spaceships.”

It costs a certain amount to live for a year, right?  Being on a boat for a year is still a year of living, so you’re going to have the same expenses as you do at home.  Groceries, etc.  So that’s the bottom line.  Shore excursions, car rentals and boat fuel will add to that, as will the possible increased number of times you’ll eat out.  But frugal people live the way they do and wealthy people burn through it like they always do.  Nothing changes on a boat.  We will anchor out as many nights as possible to save marina fees, and since we are both frugal people we don’t anticipate any economic hardship except the fuel.  At speed, MoonShine burns fuel like a b****, as expected from a 40 foot powerboat, but we’ve built that into our plans.  We are keeping our homes so will have those ongoing expenses, but again, we’ve figured all that out.  We wouldn’t be doing this if it was economically risky.  So the bottom line is, yep it’s going to be expensive, with the major cost being fuel which we estimate at between $8,000 and  $12,000 for the entire year.  I’ve done lots of estimates and talked to other people who have done this and I’m reasonably confident that’s our range.  Where else are you going to vacation, travel, live, sightsee and have a grand adventure, all in one, for $650 to $1000 a month?  You can’t book one week at a resort or at a decent hotel for that.  The boat itself I don’t consider an expense.  We got a extraordinarily well-maintained boat, it’s fully insured, and we’ll sell it when we are done with it.  I look at it like this, the money was in the bank, now it’s in a boat, eventually it’ll be back in the bank.

And if I may do a shameless plug for my other book, I’ve been selling options for something like 25 years now.  Options premium paid for much of Lucidity and all of MoonShine (and Black Sunshine, sitting in the garage) and continues to provide me with a nice income.  Check it out here:

https://www.smoothsailingwithoptions.com/

“Going cruising is the reward for being very responsible for a very long time.”

One of the fun things in buying a new boat is picking out a name.  Cheryl and I went back and forth with all kinds of names for awhile, I liked “Pestilence” as I thought it would keep people away, Cheryl liked names that were more friendly sounding like “Andiamo!”.  However that one is listed on the US Coast Guard registry dozens of times and we wanted something a bit more unique.  One day one of us mentioned “MoonShine” and we both loved it.  Cheryl because she likes moonshine on the water at night, and of course since we both live in Tennessee, it fit that way too.  No, we will not be having a still on the boat.

“We went cruising not to escape from life, but to prevent life from escaping from us.”

A car.  I’ve had my get-to-work cars, all practical, but I’ve managed to have one fun car most of the time.  And it has definitely been fun.  The sound of a 3/4 cam and dual exhaust still sounds sweet, even after all these years.  I appreciate that my generation lived an era that will never be repeated; that of the muscle car.  Oh sure, you can buy a 1000 horsepower exotic now, or even a HellCat Challenger from your local Dodge dealer, but those are expensive replicas of what used to sit on the used car lots.  By the 70’s the muscle cars of the 60’s had ten years on them, which back then was a lot, and the gas shortage of the mid-70’s made a gas-guzzling muscle car undesirable to the average working man.  So teenagers like me could pick them up on the car lot at affordable prices.  440 Chargers, 428 Mustangs, 396 Camaros; you got a huge engine with a giant carburetor or two on top and maybe even a four-speed transmission.  That was about it.  No back-up cameras, no disk brakes, no air bags, no radial tires.  “Unsafe at any speed” applied to most cars then, not just Corvairs.  Movies filled the silver screen with car chases, some of the movies of that era were in fact nothing but a two hour car chase.  And we loved ’em.  Burt Reynolds, The Cannonball Run, Vanishing Point, The GumBall Rally, Gone in 60 Seconds, those influences were what we were exposed to.  So we went out and did it.  Since there are no mountains or lakes around Dodge there was little to do compared to other parts of the country.  We did have highways, long flat highways, very little traffic, and .40 cent gas.  (Once in a while I would drive out to the airport and fill up with aviation gas at 130 octane.  Rocket fuel!)  So we dragged Earp in cars that smoked tires and left waves of rolling thunder.  We took all this for granted.  Those were my formative years, and it stuck.  So in an effort to recapture my fleeting youth, I still own a 3/4 cam dual exhaust rolling thunder kind of car, which mainly gets taken out to lunch and to the occasional car show.  I’ve had Mustangs, my last one was a 2008 convertible with close to 600 horsepower, but this time around I wanted a classic, something big, black and long.  You can’t drive fast anymore anyway, too many cars and too unsafe, and besides I’m over that part of it.  But I wanted that rumble with a hint of muscle car.  So I looked at ’63 Lincolns with the suicide doors, ’57 Ford Fairlanes and some old Cadillacs, with the intent of restoring one and adding a blower.  I came across Black Sunshine, a ’63 Ford Galaxie 500, in Duluth, MN, and fell in love.  Sold the Mustang and brought it home.  Took me two years but she’s done, blower and all, and I love it.  I have the biggest grin on my face every time I fire that motor up.  The blower whine is music.  Practical it’s not, but as one of my friends put it, “A daily driver moves your body.  A car like Black Sunshine moves your soul.”   (click on image for full size)