Log of Pogopelli: The Great Loop: 6,000 miles on a 23' sailboat

We had sailed small sailboats for a number of years, cruising the waters of Florida's northern Gulf coast. When we retired at the end of 2005, we turned our attention to a much more ambitious cruise: The Great Loop! The Great Loop has several variations in the form of lesser side trips, but essentially, it's a circumnavigation of the eastern U.S. and a bit of Canada. It's around 6,000 miles, give or take and typically done by folks with larger boats, trawlers being the most common. It is usually done in a counter-clockwise manner, to take advantage of the southerly flow of the inland rivers. We left Chattanooga, Tennessee on December 10, 2006 and returned to Chattanooga November 1, 2007. I maintained a blog of the trip as it happened, sharing our experiences and observations at the time. The result is this journal, which we hope you will enjoy. I make no claim to great literary skill, but hopefully as you take the trip with us, seeing things for the first time as we did, you'll get some sense of the adventure we had. It was the trip of a lifetime.