America's Great Loop Cruise Route Copyrighted Map
used with permission www.greatloop.com.
In 1992, we left to go cruising on our CT34 sailboat "Flying Cloud" and ended up traveling north from Miami up the Eastern US Intra-coastal waterway to Annapolis, Maryland and back to Florida. The trip took us five months, and proved to be one of the best trips we have ever taken.
Several years ago, we learned that we could travel inland up through the canals and rivers on a trip that would take us through the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi River through the heartland of the eastern US. The route is known as America's Great Loop.
After years of planning, we finally took the plunge and headed off on this adventure of a lifetime. We hung a poster of the Great Loop Cruise Routes on our boat and used it to keep track of where we stopped along the way. We devised a color coded system using dots - green for marinas, blue for anchorages, yellow for free town docks or inexpensive park docks (we LOVE those), and red for mooring buoys. We did not use many mooring buoys along the way, so we started using partial red dots to mark fuel stops - a half circle for the larger fill-ups when we let the tank get down to about half full, and a quarter circle for top-ups when we found fuel prices that we did not want to pass up.
We started the trip in Green Cove Springs, Florida where we had our boat shipped to from Alameda, California. Green Cove Springs is a small town just south of Jacksonville on the St. Johns River. Before heading north on the loop, we started our adventure with a side trip down the St. Johns River. After a couple of weeks spent exploring this beautiful part of 'old Florida', we turned around, headed north to Jacksonville, and entered the Intra-coastal Waterway which runs up the eastern seaboard of the United States all the way to Norfolk, Virginia.
Norfolk is the gateway to the Chesapeake Bay - and we spent several weeks exploring this interesting part of the world. Leaving the Chesapeake Bay (and all of those wonderfully delicious blue crabs), we headed east down Delaware Bay towards New Jersey.
We headed north up the coast of New Jersey to the mouth of the Hudson River and the gateway to the United States for so many new citizens - New York City. I can't begin to tell you how thrilling it was to take our boat into New York harbor under the watchful gaze of the Statue of Liberty.
We continued north up the Hudson past Vermont, through the pristine Lake Champlain into the French Canadian province of Quebec. We headed north to the town of Sorel before turning southwest down the Saint Lawrence river towards Montreal and Ottawa river to the capital city of Ottawa. From Ottawa, we traveled through what was perhaps our favorite part of the trip, the Rideau Canal. The Rideau seems to exist in another time where all of the locks and bridges are cranked open and closed by hand.
Leaving the Rideau, we traveled west on Lake Ontario to the town of Trenton and the Trent-Severn waterway which would take us to the spectacular Georgian Bay and even more awesome North Channel in Canada.
Leaving Canada, we traveled south back into the United States and the state of Michigan. Entering Michigan from the north, we were able to spend some time on Mackinac island, which is caught in it's own time warp since no cars are allowed on the island. All transportation is either by horse-drawn carriage or by bicycle.
We headed south down the eastern side of Lake Michigan, eventually crossing over to Chicago at the southern end of the lake. The Chicago River, which flows through the heart of this great city, connects to the Illinois, which eventually connects to the mighty Mississippi. We followed the rivers from Chicago down the Mississippi to the city of Saint Louis and that magnificent arch that towers over the city riverfront. Leaving the Mississippi, we headed up the Ohio to the Tennessee river. From the Tennessee, we took the Tenn-Tom waterway which eventually took us down to Mobile, Alabama andi the Gulf of Mexico.
From Mobile, we headed east back into Florida, following the west coast of Florida down to Fort Meyers. We cut across the state along the Okeechobee Waterway to Stuart on the east coast of Florida. From Stuart, we headed south down to Key West before turning around and heading north, back to Jacksonville and the completion of our Great Loop trip.
Click on the Next Log Entry link to see the first log of our Great Loop journey.