"Hey Hon, the couple down the dock went all around the eastern half of the United States...IN THEIR BOAT!!!! And, their boat is just like ours!"

"They did what? How'd they do that?"

"Well it had something to do with ten Toms, the Coastal Waterway, and a river named Trent Severn."

After a quick trip to “Duet” and a long conversation later with Sue & Larry Mesarich, we began to learn about the possibilities of "The Great Loop". We also learned it was the Tennessee/Tombigbee waterway (an alternate route to the lower Mississippi), the “Intercoastal Waterway which goes around much of Florida and up the East Coast of the US, and that the Trent Severn is a canal in Canada linking Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay in Lake Huron

The idea was born, and wouldn't go away.

Jim had introduced me to his long time love of "big" boats twenty years before, but it wasn't until after my retirement in the fall of 2001 and the purchase of our 32 foot Trojan in 2002 that I really became hooked on boating. We both had pictured retirement near the water. The difference was, I pictured myself in a cabin in Northern Minnesota on a lovely small lake, with a canoe on the shore. Jim saw himself in a boat on the Mississippi. The compromise was made. Try the river life first, and if that doesn't work for us, we sell the boat and get the cabin. It didn't take long for me to get my sea legs & want to do more. Each time we would reach the far end of each trip down the river I kept saying, "Let's not go back." I had found my answer: By going on "The Great Loop" we didn't have to go back! We could just keep going.

It took enthusiasm, logic, and great deal of convincing (Jim once named it nagging), for the idea to become a plan, but by August of 2004, when the Hiawatha Valley Sail and Power Squadron brought Ron and Eva Stob, to Minneapolis to tell their fascinating story of The Great Loop, we had made the mental commitment to do it ourselves. We joined the AGLCA (America’s Great Loop Cruisers’ Association) and started our plans.