- Local News for Southern Sailors - January 2002 Next Story
Cruising America's Great Loop — Part I See Part 2 : Part 3 : Part 4
By Ron and Eva Stob
Ron & Eva Stob
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No one person thought of cruising around the eastern half of North America. It wasn't as if a committee of sailors or cruisers said, "Let's take a circumnavigational cruise of North America by running up the East Coast, across the Great Lakes and down the midland rivers." No one in particular said, "Let's call it the Great Loop or the Great Circle." Sailors know this isn't a great circle. It just happened.
The first part is a definition of the Great Loop/Great Circle and how we got started.
The second part concentrates on the trip from Florida through the Chesapeake. The third takes the reader up the Hudson and through the heritage canals of Canada and into the Great Lakes to Chicago. Part four covers the trip downstream from Chicago on the rivers to the Gulf and across to Tarpon Springs, Fort Myers and back to Fort Lauderdale. While most who do this trip use trawlers, sailboats are seen everywhere along the route, albeit they are under power for the most part and with masts lowered. Click map below for larger view. 
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Waterways were developed in early America as highways of commerce. Shoal areas were deepened by locks and dams, rivers were connected, sloughs dredged, and the entire system was connected from the tropics of Florida to the glaciated waters of Canada and down the big muddy rivers. Eventually cruisers were back in salt air with the hint of magnolias and jasmine wafting on sea breezes. Rivers and waterways were the country's Main Streets. It was the only way the Queen Mother could supply her colonies, and once the goods were here, water was the expedient passage from point A to B.
When Ponce de Leon came to Florida in 1517, and later when St. Augustine was founded as a city (1565), the Spanish sought a way of protecting themselves from the water, the likely confrontation with the bothersome French who were into burning and pillaging, and the stinging English who, in their gentlemanly ways, shelled and ran swords through unfriendly flesh.
The French and the English fulfilled the expectation of the Spanish by shelling the wooden Spanish forts from their warships until the Spanish were really mad. Some Spaniard had a good idea—build the fort out of coquina. Voila, they built a fort the French and English couldn't destroy. For over a hundred years the Spanish stood their ground. Castillo de San Marcos, circa 1685, was and still is the only Spanish fort on American soil.
Then came the pioneers, hunters, railroads, and New Yorkers seeking a winter tan. By 1821 the Spaniards gave up, packed their gear and went home, leaving their fort behind them. Thank you.
Then the U.S. government got involved. In 1853 the Army dug through the Mosquito Lagoon and the Indian River to make a 150-mile navigable waterway between Cocoa and New Smyrna Beach along Florida's central east coast. Still to come were grants by the state to develop the waterways for commerce.
In 1897 the Florida East Coast Canal and Transportation Company opened the waterways in Florida to traffic. When the company went bust following hurricanes in 1925, the state of Florida created the Florida Inland Navigation District. By 1935 the Army deepened and widened the Atlantic ICW to what we know today.
Similar development took place throughout the United States. Governor Clinton of New York was determined that his state have a waterway connection to the west through the Great Lakes. His Big Ditch concept was considered loony by many, but in 1819 the New Yorkers, determined to be an empire state, began digging the Niagara River eastward to connect with the Seneca, the Oswego and the Mohawk rivers until there was a connection between the Hudson and Lake Erie. The Erie Canal is one of the routes for boaters on the Great Loop.
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Shoals obstruct many rivers. Dams and locks were built to raise water levels until the rivers became pools. This is not to suggest, however, that cruising the Great Loop is like sailing a sailboat in the bathtub. Cruising around eastern North America approximates pioneers moving across the prairies. In the marsh grass of the Carolinas and through maritime forests, the continental waterfront is often virgin and undisturbed; at other places it resembles a marketplace.
We stumbled on the idea of cruising the Great Loop accidentally. We had chartered a single-screw cruising tug on Canada's historic Trent-Severn Waterway, circa 1850-1920. At the historic village of Bobcaygeon we saw a great white Swan with Norfolk, Virginia, on the transom, and Eva approached the captain.
"Pardon me, but how did you get into Canada and the Trent-Severn from Virginia?"
"By way of the Mississippi River," the captain replied.
Momentarily speechless, we traced in our minds the geography of the country that allowed him to cruise from Virginia southward, across Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, up the rivers and somehow to get into Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, and the Trent-Severn Waterway.
The captain explained that the Mississippi connects to the Illinois River, which ties into the Chicago River, which flows naturally into Lake Michigan (the river now flows southward, downstream to the Gulf). The eastern half of the country is really an island.
Months later, Eva heard about the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (something we didn't know about), and you could hear the closing of mental synapses. "Honey, we don't have to go out in the open water of the Atlantic Ocean. The entire trip is an inside passage."
To sailors this sounds absolutely wimpy, but we were neither boaters nor sailors, and the prospect of cruising for the better part of a year on a big boat appeared awesome.
We tied up with the Costa de Oro Power Squadron, a local unit of the United States Power Squadrons on California's Central Coast. We were a long way from the eastern half of the country, but this squadron was largely composed of sailors who were engineers at Vandenberg Air Force Base. They thought it was preposterous for a couple of novices to buy a boat in the east, live on it for nearly a year while plying the 6,300-mile loop, but they recognized virgin, receptive minds, and they put their heads together to educate us for the trip.
The public boating course was followed by classes in seamanship, engine maintenance, piloting and advanced piloting. Trips across the country to boatyards and marinas narrowed our choices. Two years rolled by. We bankrolled our property, put a down payment on a 40-foot trawler, and packed 15 boxes of household goods to ship to the boat we had chosen in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
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Art courtesy of American's Great Loop Cruisers' Association and Raven Cove Publishing.
Copyright © 2001 Southwinds Media.
All rights reserved. 12.30.01