In which Sid and Doris muse on the wisdom of sailing around in circles.
There is an increasing passion for developing Amazing Journeys which people can add to their Bucket Lists and hopefully and not coincidentally leave large amounts of disposable cash in various establishments along the route. The Pennine Way and Lands End to John O’Groats have been pushed aside in the UK by the North Coast 500, an incentive to people to drive in a big circle round the Scottish coast to the north of Inverness, and now cursed by locals for choking the roads with oversized and inexpertly-driven rented motorhomes, and taxing bed & breakfast owners with a series of single-night stays rather than the weekly holidaymakers they were used to.
In America we have the Great Loop, a 6000 nautical mile loop supported and indeed promoted by the America’s Great Loop Cruising Association. Much of their site is behind a paywall, giving the casual and alas only mildly interested reader a chance to subscribe, sponsor, and buy merch by clicking on many different links which appear to offer information.
Briefly, the route is: up the E coast on the Intracoastal Waterway, up the Hudson River and some canals take you across to the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi and back along the Florida coast. It is possible to avoid most big offshore passages and it has an amazing range of opportunities for different types of sailing, eating and sightseeing. It takes about a year and you need a boat which is capable of going long distances down narrow channels and which has a maximum draft of around 5′, which broadly means a motor boat. Many people buy a boat just to do the Loop and then sell it afterwards, and there is a brisk market in selling multi-Loop boats to single-Loop people. As we have mentioned, it is promoted to Sid and Doris by Joe whenever we get near the water.
Some free-to-view clicky click takes us to this debate about Looping in a small-draft sailboat but as Joe observes sailboat people do seem to spend a lot of time ducking to see round a deckful of mast while chugging along under motor.
Albany (NY) is the place where Loopers turn left (or to port, as we Nautical Coves say) and start going up the Erie Canal, and with only a small deviation it turns out to be coincidentally on our route for this trip. Doris walks along the pontoon where there are several motorboats flying the America’s Great Loop Association Official Burgee ($39 plus p&p, sales tax etc plus you need to be a member which is another $105) and chats about the fun they are having, the best way to stow a dinghy for easy access when you are anchoring/mooring and the correct size of boat to take. Everyone seems very positive. although this is often a relatively early part of the Loop. Sid wanders up to see the enormous lock in action.
Three 35-45′ motor boats are dwarfed by the huge lock.
The lock fills viciously fast with all the water entering on the near side and the boats being banged horribly on the far side. Fender ropes on the front boat (crewed by a Couple of A Certain Age) are snapped.
Sid and Doris look at the damage, at the boats, at the lock, at each other.
An information board says that this is the first lock in the Waterford Flight – five locks over just one and a half miles, with a total height gain of 169 feet. There are 34 locks on this canal and a further 44 on the Severn-Trent which is a highly-recommended variation on the Loop route.
While we write this entry, Sid directs Doris to the home sailing bookshelf where Roger Oliver’s “Sailing Around the UK and Ireland” seems to have found a home between “Heavy Weather Sailing” and “117 Days Adrift”. A circumnavigation of the UK in a smallish, easily-handled but comfortable sailboat, and requiring only a few overnight passages is about 2,250-2,500 miles and would be done in around 3 months depending on your appetite for fast progress vs exploration.
So, if you were a Sailor of a Certain Age, would you opt for a year motoring round the Loop, or three months sailing round the UK? Soft shelled crabs or Fish N Chips? Comments in the box below.
PS Neither the Loop nor the UK circumnavigation are to be compared with Cruiser Dinghy Sailing, by the way. Buckets on this size of boats only have a single use.