December 2024 Blog Update

---

I attempt to explain why I’ve just been releasing posts with video links lately and what my plans for this site are in the months to come.

---

I’m embarrassed. I have almost completely dropped the ball on this blog, letting large portions of my trip go undocumented. To seemingly make matters worse, the last six posts here have been to provide links to videos I’ve been publishing on my personal YouTube channel.

This blog post will explain what’s going on in my life and how it’s impacting what appears here — and what will appear here in the future.

The Burnout Is Real

I finished my Great Loop journey in August in Chicago, approximately 22 months after I started. The reason it took so long is because I wasn’t retired in the summer of 2023 so I could not do the northern part of the Loop then. Instead, I did a “boomerang loop” with a “side trip” from Annapolis to Key West and back in the winter of 2023-2024. While going south is always a great way to spend a winter — I’ve been doing it many years now, although usually on land — I did get a bit tired of certain parts of the ICW. (Seriously: you can keep just about anything south of Stuart, FL. Those low bridges and endless No Wake zones!)

I returned to Do It Now on Kent Island in the beginning of May 2024 after taking one last trip home. I started my return to the loop by providing three days of training to a future looper — if you see Matt on Condor, say hello! — and another day of training to a new Ranger Tug owner. Then I got underway, heading north through Delaware and New Jersey.

By May 20, I was in New York, and ready to begin what I’d soon realize was my favorite part of the Loop: just about everything north of New York City. I went up the Hudson River with an old friend on board, then continue north without her. I made a side trip up to Lake Champlain, amazed that I could visit Vermont in a boat, and then continued down the Erie Canal to the Oswego Canal and eventually Lake Ontario and Kingston, Ontario in Canada. All along the way, I met up with and even buddy boated with a bunch of Loopers, including more than a few “Gold Loopers” who just cruised the area with no intention of ever doing the entire Loop again. It got me thinking that’s what I wanted to do when I was done.

Vermont by boat! Whodathunkit?

On my first night off the Trent Severn, I managed to squeeze into a spot on a full dock with a bunch of Looper friends and Canadian locals. This is one of the benefits of having a small boat.

I loved the Trent Severn and Georgian Bay. Lots of “roughing it” on lock walls and at anchor at gloriously secluded spots. But somewhere along the way I picked up a sinus infection that made me pretty miserable by the time I got back into US waters in late July.

That’s when the burnout began.

You see, until then I was totally enjoying the entire trip, not understanding the folks who rushed through it as if being chased by bill collectors. I didn’t take nearly as much time as I wanted to, mostly because I had a self-imposed deadline to be back in Washington State with my boat for a Ranger Tug event in September. But other folks were speeding through the stops, obviously motivated to get done as quickly as they could. That includes a couple I met in Canada who had sold their boat the day I met them and were eager to get it down to Grafton to turn it over to the new owners, future Loopers.

But when I got sick and had trouble finding medical attention and then getting a prescription and basically felt like crap for days on end, I started feeling a little homesick. I wanted my big, comfy bed in my quiet house, with my bathtub and big fridge and washer and dryer. I wanted to be able to open my door to let my pups in and out to do their business without involving leashes, poop bags, or dinghy rides. I just wanted my life to be easy again.

That cleared up a bit when I recovered from the sinus infection, but by that time, I was glad I had a deadline and more than ready to meet it. So the last two weeks of the trip were mostly me going through the motions, looking ahead to the moment I’d cross my wake.

It didn’t make things any better when I caught Covid in Chicago and then had to get my boat home while battling Covid symptoms. But that’s another story.

Once burnout had set in, I pretty much dropped any pretense of trying to keep up with my blog or YouTube channel. There are lots and lots of days when I didn’t record any video or make notes about my trip. That’s unfortunate because it’s going to make writing a complete account of my trip very difficult. Yet that’s what I’m facing this winter.

My Solution to Burnout

First of all, although I was burned out from cruising the Great Loop, I wasn’t burned out from cruising in general. I got my boat into the water at Puget Sound right after Labor Day and began cruising there.

If you like the northern part of the Great Loop, you’d love the San Juan Islands and Inside Passage. Holy cow. I’d tasted it as a new boat owner back in September 2022, but now I could dine on it. I explored the islands on my own and with a few friends, then joined a flotilla that got as far north as the Octopus Islands and Desolation Sound.

I was prepping myself for my next adventure: a cruise up to Alaska on the Inside Passage. I was planning on three full months, leaving the Seattle area in mid-May. I needed to make some improvements to the boat — mostly adding capacity to my solar setup — and do a lot of research. I was also interested in finding folks who wanted to join me in a flotilla for all or part of the trip.

But while I was on that two-week Desolation Sound flotilla trip, I realized two things:

• I didn’t want to be away from home for another whole summer. I missed my garden, I missed the views, I missed the creature comforts of my rather unusual home. I missed my friends, who seemed to be aging even faster than I was.
• I could spend a summer mixing home life with cruising in a great place if I based my boat at a Puget Sound marina.

The big problem was finding a marina I liked that was affordable. I’m retired now and living off retirement savings until I am ready to go on social security in a few years. I’ve become thrifty. That’s why when I finished cruising for the season, I brought my boat home and put it into the garage. (I have a very large garage.) But I didn’t plan on keeping it there. The plan was to put it in the water in mid April, base it at a marina for a month, and then, to save marina costs, do that Alaska trip. Without the trip, I’d need to park it somewhere and I was looking at about $400-$500 per month for a slip — if I could find one. To be frank, that was money I didn’t want to spend.

But I did find a solution: I put my boat in the charter fleet at San Juan Sailing/San Juan Yachting. Based in Bellingham, WA, SJS/SJY will keep my boat in a slip at a great marina, ready to use by me or charter guests. While the main idea is for the boat to be chartered, I’m sure there will be plenty of open weeks for me to use it. Best of all, the income it generates will pay for all of the costs of ownership, including insurance, maintenance, and that marina slip. If it’s a busy season, I’ll even be able to pocket some of that money for use on my Alaska trip in 2026.

There’s a bit more to it than this. I’ve also been contracted with the company to do some training for them. It seems that an OUPV Captain’s license, 9000 (mostly solo) nautical miles over two years in my Ranger Tug, and two full-day instructor training courses is enough to qualify me to teach other people close quarters maneuvering and cruising skills in single and twin engine power boats. So despite retirement, it looks like I have a good gig that’ll keep me on the water.

(And yes, I have years of teaching experience, starting in the 1990s when I caught computer applications in a classroom environment to the jewelry-making instruction I do when I’m home to the training I did for boaters in Maryland last spring.)

This is my solution to burnout: taking a year off from full-time cruising, putting my boat to work, and getting myself some teaching gigs close to home. (And yes, I’m still available to help Loopers start their Great Loop trips.)

The Blog and the Videos

That brings you up to date with where I am now in December 2024: Home with Do It Now resting in my garage. But it also brings up something else: why am I home in the winter for the first time in more than 10 years?

I live in a great place and I love my home, but I hate it here in the winter. Most days — although, ironically not today — it’s cold and dreary with very little sunlight and sometimes a bit too much snow and ice. I’ve always gone south for the winter in my RV, although last year I took Do It Now south as far as the Florida Keys instead. But this year I’ve decided to stay home. Why?

After 10 days of gray skies and low clouds, today is a spectacularly sunny day with views of the North Cascades from my window.

So I could work on my blog and make YouTube videos about my travels.

Yep. I decided to stay home to work.

I don’t think it’s a secret that I’m working on a book about My Great Loop Adventure and that book will be based upon what I’ve written in this blog. But I’ve got a lot of gaps in this blog — weeks and months with nothing written about my travels. I need to remedy that by filling in the gaps. And that means sitting down with my photos, videos, boat logs, and journal notes to remember and record what I did and where I went and what it means in the grand scheme of things.

It’s not a small task — especially for the parts that date all the way back to the late winter of 2023, when I stopped writing at Clearwater Beach. I am not looking forward to reconstructing those cruise days.

I’m more fortunate for having photos, footage, and daily journal entries starting in January 2024. The daily journal entries, although short, are an excellent tool for remembering what I was doing and seeing those days. If you don’t keep a daily journal, I highly recommend that you start, especially if you’re aged 50 or older. Trust me: memory fades. But just jotting down a few things about your day every day will really serve you in the future.

In the meantime, as part of the promotion for this blog and the book to come, I’ve begun building a following on my personal YouTube channel. I know from experience — I built a very popular channel about flying helicopters back when I flew for a living — that YouTube is a double-edged sword. It’s great to have a free place to share video content, but the only way to keep a channel active in the algorithm so people see your content is to keep feeding YouTube. So I’ve been trying to put out a new video every week. I’m finding that my later footage has more features — better camera angles, chartplotter views, better audio — that my earlier footage. So it’s a mixed bag with what will appear. If you haven’t checked any of them out, I recommend doing so. The one about the Waterford Flight of Five locks on the Erie Canal is one of my favorites, although it’s been criticized a bit for my complaining about another boat that locked through with me all morning. (The critics are right, but I was really frustrated by these folks.) I also have one that explains how to go through locks when boating solo. And, for some reason, my video about going from Elizabeth City to Coinjock — a trip most Loopers won’t ever do — has become extremely popular.

Now you might be wondering why I can’t work on the blog and the videos while I’m enjoying the Arizona sun this winter. After all, I do have a laptop and I was able to do a lot of blogging from the boat.

I’ll be honest with you since I’ve already been honest with myself: I can’t focus on creative work when I’m traveling. I just spend too much time traveling and seeing the sights and hanging out with friends. When I travel, I want to enjoy the journey. Nothing else gets done. I know this and I’m not going to fight it.

So I’ll just stay home and work. The motivation is being able to goof off again when I’m done. (Just like the days when I wrote books for a living; I’d work 10-12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and then take a few weeks off before I started the next one.)

The Plan

So here’s the plan and I hope you’ll force me to stick to it.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll work on the blog to start filling in the gaps. I hope to start in Florida in January 2023, where a few of the current Loopers reading this might be. At the same time, I’ll try to keep putting out a new video every Sunday. Topics will bounce around a bit, although I’ll try to add content relative to where Loopers are right now.

You can help me a few ways:

• Comment on my blog posts and videos. Share your experiences or ask questions you want answers to. Your participation motivates me to keep producing content.
• Share links to blog posts and videos with other Loopers or boaters you think might be interested. I’m not on Facebook and I’m no longer a member of AGLCA so I don’t have access to those places to share links. If you do, you can help me out by sharing them!
• Get in touch and let me know what topics you want me to cover. While I appreciate it if you share your suggestions in the comments to my blog posts and videos, you can also contact me by email.
• If you feel so inclined, buy me a cup of coffee or make a donation to help cover the cost of hosting this blog and buying the equipment I need to keep making videos.

Start now! Did you read this post to the end? I’m impressed. Let me know in the comments here or, better yet, tell me what you want me to write about next.