Great Loop Recap

As promised in the last post I thought I'd post a few details of our Great Loop adventure for those interested. Jill has kept an amazing spread sheet of our daily costs and travel details and this makes it pretty easy to share the information.

• Total days on the Loop-330
• Travel days-130
• Total distance-5746 miles

This equates to an average of 44.2 miles per travel day but that really doesn't tell you much. Longest day other than the Gulf crossing was 134 miles on the Mississippi & Ohio. Shortest day was only 8 miles when we left Oriental NC and immediately ran into bad weather.

The cost of doing the Loop varies greatly from boat to boat and can't really be estimated based on only our experience. Many boaters enjoy anchoring out in a quite cove for the night which can help cut the cost a bunch. We prefer to stop in a marina and check out what each town has to offer. We spent 2 months at the most expensive marina in Marathon because all the others were full but really enjoyed our time there. The following is our expense break down top to bottom.

• Marinas (by far #1)
• Eating out
• Fuel-2776 gallons at about 3.09 per gallon
• Maintenance cost and car rental round out the top 5

By moving so often you don't really get the best price at marinas. We have 3 months reserved on the Gulf coast this winter at an average of $11.00 a foot plus electric. It's already shaping up to be a much cheaper winter.

Along the way we stayed in 16 different States and 1 Canadian Provence. Longest stay was, by far, Florida and shortest was 1 night in Delaware. We traveled through 104 locks and have gotten pretty good at them!

Everyone has different ideas about what their Loop experience will be. Some people take several years to complete it and travel between home and the boat as time, work and family allow. Some go around faster than we did just to say they did it. We looked at our trip as a fact finding mission. We plan to be living on the boat for several years and just wanted to see what's out there for the next go around.

Our plans for the next year are to spend this winter/spring on the Northern Gulf Coast between Florida and Texas. Next summer we're going to travel back up the Tenn-Tom and explore the river systems around here. Maybe even up the Ohio above Cincinnati a bit...who knows. As of now we plan on starting south about the 10th of October so keep an eye out for our Tweets and tracker.

The trip to Cincinnati last weekend was a great time and we enjoyed catching up with friends and family. The doctors visits didn't go as well since we had just spent the weekend Oktoberfesting....poor planning on our part! Who knew that a weekend of drinking would lead to higher blood pressure??

Till next time, somewhere south....Prost!!!