Coda

(A special thanks to Norma for this great image.)

Have you ever had the pleasure of reading a powerful, gripping book, one that totally engrosses you and transports you to worlds you didn’t know existed—so that as you approach the final pages, a part of you is sad that the story will soon end?

That is how it feels to see this trip wind down. The book we lived, “The Year of The Great Loop” has come to its final chapter.

The boat is parked in Iuka, MS, listed with a broker, emptied out, and no longer alive with the laughter, adventures, challenges and life that she was filled with for a year.

But that’s not a bad thing. It’s just a change, and life is change. Those things will go with us. Wherever and whatever we do next, the laughter, adventure, challenges and life that we so enjoyed will be there. As bittersweet as it is to end here, I’m filled with anticipation of what will come next. (Travel? Maybe a houseboat? Italy?) It doesn’t even need to be an adventure. Heck, I’m ready to simply sit on my deck on a gorgeous afternoon and get lost in a good book. Ride my bike. Enjoy a concert. Visit friends. Not look at weather apps!

Cheryl kept track of the numbers:

• We visited 17 states, 1 province, and 2 countries
• We gathered 173 boat cards from other Loopers.
• We Looped for 326 days
• We logged 601 boat hours over 121 travel days
• We traveled 5,691.29 miles
• Our average speed was 9.6 mph
• We took 2 trips home for a couple of weeks each
• We traversed 105 locks
• We stayed at 86 marinas that ranged in price from $50-$208/ night (I won’t even calculate how much we spent in total)
• We anchored out or stayed on free walls 28 times
• We made 37 fuel stops
• We paid from $3.20-$7.09/gallon for diesel fuel with an average of $4.95/gallon
• We purchased 4,382.2 gallons of fuel
• We paid $21,715.21 for fuel.
• (Butch) I wore out a brand new pair of Tevas!

Our stops along the way:

So, here are some of our thoughts about the whole thing. First, Cheryl:

• Butch’s and my friends are the BEST. It amazed us how far they traveled to visit us.
• It was awesome to share segments of the Loop with Butch’s brother Bill & sister-in-law MaryAnn, cousins Rick & Janae, and friends Ron & Jane.
• The Mississippi churns up in random places- actually looking like it is starting to boil.
• I spent an inordinate amount of time (and walking miles) looking for post office drop boxes to mail postcards to my granddaughter each week.
• We collected 173 boat cards which represents meeting over 350 fellow boaters (some didn’t have boat cards).
• I didn’t realize you couldn’t just boat wherever you wanted in any given body of water. Even huge bodies of water have REALLY shallow spots where you will do serious damage to your boat if you try to cruise over them.
• Currents, wind direction & strength, wave & swell heights, and tides are to be taken seriously.
• The Great Lakes are far more intimidating to me than any other body of water we were on.
• Weather and wave predictions on Lake Michigan are a crap shoot.
• My insistence to be off Lake Michigan by Labor Day was confirmed. Right after we got off, there were 21 foot seas and gale force winds for a couple days.
• I can do hard and gross things.
• Butch and I survived (and enjoyed) being in a very confined space for 11 months.
• The coastal Carolina towns were absolutely adorable.
• The Western Michigan towns were charming and welcoming.
• None of my immediate family members has ever seen the boat.
• I was able to keep milk on the boat every single day- although at times it was almost as difficult as finding mail drop boxes.
• I spent way too much time planning to do laundry and figuring out where to buy milk.
• Fish flies are now just a nuisance, not a nightmare. But still gross.
• I’ve actually been able to kill a few spiders but Butch did a phenomenal job keeping them off the boat and away from me. They are everywhere around water!
• I know what a line, a stern, a transom, a cleat, a fly bridge, an inverter, an impeller, a thruster, a shaft, and trim tabs are as well as their relevance to boating.
• I didn’t lose any more screens or flood the boat again.
• I only lost one pair of prescription glasses in the water.
• Losing my phone in the water was a constant fear and the thought of doing so will probably wake me up at night for months to come.
• I really, really missed my friends, dancing, and my house (especially my bathroom and my laundry room!)
• Food was EVERYWHERE on the Loop and I ate waaaay too much of it!
• Anchor lights attract bugs from 3 different zip codes.
• The Great Lakes were the most beautiful water we traveled through.
• Loopers are some of the kindest, caring, most generous people I’ve ever met.
• I’ve made new friends for life.
• Butch got more comments on his KU flag than I got on my Michigan flag.
• I wasn’t able to attend my 50th Class Reunion and my BFF’s 75th birthday party.
• I missed seeing my grand daughters grow up this past year.
• Butch took such wonderful care of me (even on those days I’m sure he would’ve preferred to leave me on a random dock).
• Butch and I make a remarkable team.
• Hula hooping on a boat is a pipe dream.
• It is simply IMPOSSIBLE to keep the outside of a boat clean.
• I will be very happy to do laundry in my own machines any time I want.
• I swam only three times even though I was on the water for a year.
• Canada was absolutely breathtaking.
• It was incredibly reassuring to know that we had people following our every move- even in the smaller waters it meant the world to us.
• I hate crab pots and in protest, will never eat crab again.
• We didn’t get any Asian carp in our boat because they were all dying of heat stroke as we passed down the Mississippi.
• I was sadder than I ever anticipated to see our journey come to an end.

And my thoughts:

First and foremost, I have to thank Cheryl. I simply cannot overstate how essential she was to the success of our adventure. Beyond the sheer fun, beyond seamlessly hosting docktails, keeping us fed with style, and managing everything from the logbook to laundry to a shipshape deck, she was the companion who reminded me every single day just how ridiculously lucky I am. It was a true pleasure to do this together. When people ask me for the highlight of the trip, my answer is immediate; it was the teamwork, love, and companionship we shared. I can’t wait to see where we go and what we do next.

A huge thanks to my brother Bill for hosting this site and fixing it numerous times when I jammed it up. Without his help, these updates would not have happened. Bill also kept an eye on us via the internet when we were making big passages, which was reassuring. Another big thanks to the many, many people who made this possible, including the AGLCA group. Like Jimmy Buffett, who sold the dream of sailing off into the sunset, they are selling a dream of adventure. The AGLCA dream, however, is not too far off from the reality. It truly is an adventure, a heck of a way to spend a year, and a community, and we are so grateful to have been a part of it.

There is a significant commitment required before you go cruising. Not merely the money but the friction in wrenching your life around such that it will accommodate such an undertaking. Elderly parents, kids, homes, careers, pets, even friends, can all be weights that must be shrugged clear. Our society fundamentally distrusts the unusual, the oddballs, and the risk-takers. So when you do something like this, you may get resistance from fools people who have no idea of how to live their own lives, much less tell you how to live yours. Ignore ‘em.

After all, that gold flag looks pretty good up there!

An acquaintance of mine who circumnavigated the world on a sailboat with his family many years ago wrote this, and I took it to heart:

“Looking back, I came to a point where I realized that my talent was modest, that I would never be a star in the galaxy of fame. If I didn’t change I would, for the rest of my life, do my best, pay my debts, and finally die the mediocre middle class man that I really was. And if that sounds a little strong, I intend it to, because those are some of the feelings that allowed me to act quixotically. And for those feelings I shall be eternally grateful.”

Yes!

Another obstacle is the opportunity cost of a trip like this. If you are doing this, you can’t do that. A number of friends seem surprised that we’d put the boat up for sale, but I am interested in way too many other things to spend my remaining years focused on one thing, no matter how rewarding.

We were fortunate to be in a place and time where all these conditions were met. Cheryl and I have both lost enough people, opportunities and years that we recognized and took a shot at something bigger than us when we saw it. This was a chance to stretch a bit, to live a colorful, active life that beckoned with almost magical allure. (And then somehow actually lived up to that.)

The Loop rewarded us with an immense, and I mean immense, cargo of memories.

The sunsets over the water that turned the whole sky into something like a struck match, unrepeatable, the kind of beauty that makes you want to apologize to everyone you’ve ever tried to describe a sunset to before. The mesmerizing light on the water; a constant companion and an endless delight. The moon, rising majestically night after night. We found, in town after small town—places with names like Grand Haven and Southport and Blind River—that strangers still hand you their kindness like it costs them nothing. There were strangers who became friends simply because we happened to share a dock, a meal, a storm, or a story. Again and again we were surprised by the generosity of people who had no reason to know us and every reason to go on with their own lives. This “Great Loop” was indeed a true kaleidoscope of adventure, laughter, learning and beauty.

What I carry home is the accumulated lightness of time, spent whole—over three hundred days governed simply by weather, water, and each other, free from the noise of news and notifications. Time that most couples spend in fragments, stolen from each busy 24 hours. We had the rare gift of time together—long stretches of it, with nowhere else to be except the next place the boat could carry us.

It was an emotional moment to leave the boat, more so than we expected. However, some things remain the same. I’ve been here before. I wrote the following paragraph over a decade ago, after selling Lucidity, my other magic carpet sailboat, and I vividly remember standing in the salon, looking around, saying goodbye, just as we did last week aboard MoonShine. These words ring true aboard MoonShine as much as they ever did aboard Lucidity:

“There were times, more than I can count, when I stood on the deck of Lucidity with the sun on my face and mother ocean passing beneath and felt like a god. She sailed as if forever, powering through the waves, perfectly balanced on the cosmic knife-edge between air and water, driven by the yin/yang of the great wheel in the sky. More than a few times I realized with a soul-shuddering intensity that I was standing on the wind-catching, sunset-chasing rock-solid manifestation of a dream come true. My dream. Those times were so impossible as to seem unreal but they were some of the most real moments in my life.”

To say I’m a lucky man, and that a boat can be a magic carpet, is a vast, vast understatement.

But now I’m back in my office, at my desk, with the familiar all around me. There is a peculiar ache in coming home after a long absence, one that settles into the body before the mind has quite caught up to it. After a year aboard MoonShine, chasing the compass of the Great Loop through locks and rivers and the wide gray expanses of open water, you forget the specific gravity of your own front steps, the give of your own mattress, the exact slant of afternoon light through your own kitchen window. I missed the library, for example, with such depth that it surprised me. Not just the books, but the hush of it, the particular sunlight through tall windows onto oak tables, the small civic miracle of a place that asks nothing of you but curiosity. I missed the bike path that follows the creek behind the house, the way it transports you to a world of cool green, just steps away from the world of asphalt. A trip like this is spectacularly satisfying, yes, but the comfort of returning home carries a powerful, deep, quiet magic.

I am glad to be home. I am not quite the same person who left.

I know the vast mosaic of accumulated memories will slowly begin to fade, blurring the vivid sharpness of each place, person, and passage into a faint, distant and oh-so-pleasant drift. But like the cautionary warning etched onto a car’s side mirror—”Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear“—the moments we leave behind will always have a way of being with us, retaining a proximity and providing a gentle warmth throughout our lives even long after they seem to have receded out of sight.

For that I am eternally grateful.

“Long you’ll live and high you fly

Smiles you give and tears you’ll cry

All you touch and all you see

Is all your life will ever be….” Pink Floyd