Greg retired in January 2019 after 45 years as a general contractor. Maggie retired a year earlier from her career in medical administration. Our two yorkies, River and Cooper didn’t retire from anything, they continue to bring us both much joy and unconditional love. “Retired” from careers but not retired from an active life, staying involved with family, church and community.
We were married in Atlanta, January 11, 1975 and spent our entire careers in the metro Atlanta area. Greg always had a love for sailing, he kept a sailboat on Lake Lanier and was active in racing. Many of our vacations included sailing somewhere in the Caribbean, chartering bareboat with friends in the Virgin Islands, St. Martin, Antigua, Guadalupe etc. We very much enjoyed our sailing trips over a span of thirty plus years. Then one recent year while sailing with our nephew Jeff in the British Virgin Islands, we realized it is much harder on our aging bodies to raise sails, tact multiple times to get where you want to go, so we said to each other, ‘we need to rethink this boating thing’.
That’s when we realized we are not the only Baby Boomers feeling the pain and crossing over to the other side, that is, to a power boat, might be the way to stay active on the water without all the fuss of handling sails.
Ok, Maggie said ‘what do we do with a power boat if we had one?’ Well, that’s easy to answer, we go on a long cruise, The Great American Loop on a trawler power boat big enough to call home. The “Loop” as it’s called is a circumnavigation of the eastern USA and Canada. From Florida we would go North on the intracoastal waterway (ICW) to New York City, enter North on the Hudson River to the Erie Canal to the Oswego Canal into Lake Ontario, through Canada via Trent Severn and Georgian Bay to Mackinaw Island to Lake Michigan to Chicago where we enter the Illinois River to Mississippi River to Ohio River to Cumberland River into Kentucky Lake and Tennessee River to Pickwick Lake where we pick up the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway (canal) to Mobile, AL cross the Mobile Bay to the Gulf intracoastal waterway east to Carrabelle, FL where we cross 170 miles of Gulf open waters to Tarpan Springs, continue to follow the intracoastal waterway to Ft. Myers, cross Florida to the east coast via the Okeechobee Lake and canal and arrive at Stuart, FL to complete the “Loop”. Now that sounds easy enough, follow my directions, keep turning left (counter-clockwise) and with an iPad loaded with Navionics and AquaMap, what could go wrong.
We purchased our trawler, Serenity Blue, a Mainship 430 at Green Turtle Bay Marina in Grand Rivers, KY. After a year plus of cruising Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley, getting comfortable with just the two of us handling the boat and completing a long list of ‘to do’s’ we finally cast off our lines of security which have been tethered to our home port of Grand Rivers, KY. So begins the voyage of left turns……..
Mark Twain wrote, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than the ones you did do. So throw off the bowline. Sail away from safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in you sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
Throughout the blog #1-30 refer to quotes from The Thirty Life Principles by Dr. Charles F. Stanley.