We Finished The Loop

June 8, 2015 – July 12, 2018

We did it! We finished our Loop on July 12, 2018, crossing our wake at the Statue of Liberty where we had started our Great Loop on June 10, 2015. It didn’t take us that long to do the trip, but it took us that long to finish.

This July, Brian and I set out on Pearl from our pier on Dymer Creek in White Stone, Virginia, to finish our Great Loop Adventure. We passed the Statue of Liberty on July 12 and raised our golden burgee to proclaim our accomplishment. We had flown a white AGLCA burgee while traveling on the Loop, but when we finished, we earned the right to fly the gold one. 

Here is a brief summary of the trip. We started the Great Loop on Pearl from Essex, Connecticut, planting our wake at the Statue of Liberty on June 8, 2015. That year, we traveled for six months on the boat. We went up the Hudson River, through the Erie Canal, across Lake Ontario, through the Trent-Severn Waterway in Canada to Georgian Bay, through the North Channel, into Lake Superior, and down Lake Michigan to Chicago. In September, we continued south with a caravan of Loopers on the major rivers and waterways until we reached Mobile, Alabama, in early November. Then, from Carabelle, Florida, we crossed the Gulf of Mexico for 18 hours on a calm, starry night, reaching Clearwater the next morning. Soon afterwards, we left the boat near Lake Okeechobee and returned to Connecticut for the winter, just the opposite of what most people do.

Brian went back to work until April 2016, when we returned to Florida with our two cats and continued the adventure. The best dolphins are in Fort Myers, and we got to see them twice: when we arrived in November and again five months later when we left. We went down to the Keys, circled around Florida, and traveled up the ICW along the Atlantic coast until we reached Virginia in June. To make a long story short, we saw a house we liked on a creek in Virginia and owned it within a week. That’s where our Adventure paused while we sold our Connecticut house and completed the renovations on our Virginia house. Two years later, in July 2018, we boarded Pearl for a month and finished the Loop, crossing our wake at the Statue of Liberty on July 12!   Hooray!!

The interesting thing about finishing the Great Loop was the great sense of completion that Brian and I both experienced when it was over. We felt like we could put it behind us and move on to new adventures. Surprisingly, neither of us had realized how important it was to finish it until we actually did! 

Another unexpected outcome of the long trip was that it really did change our lives! Each of us had spent many hours in contemplation (because that’s what you do on a 7,600 mile trip at 10 miles per hour). Separately, we both reached the conclusion that we wanted to return to the Chesapeake Bay area, and when we discovered this house on Dymer Creek in Virginia, we were ready to commit. A wonderful result of that decision is that we now live closer to three of our children.

Now, every morning we look forward to the beautiful sunrise over Dymer Creek. We are so glad this is how our trip turned out.

Take care,

Ellen & Brian Clarke

and Pearl