America’s Great Loop is a roughly 6,000 mile circumnavigation of the eastern United States and part of Canada which usually takes about a year to complete. We will start our Loop trip from our home port of St. Petersburg, FL, travel down to the Keys and then up the intracoastal waterway, through the Chesapeake Bay to the Hudson River in New York, through either the Erie and Oswego Canals into Lake Ontario or the Champlain Canal to Canada where we will cruise the Trent-Sevren Waterway and Georgian Bay before returning to the US on Lake Michigan to Chicago and then back down via the Illinois, Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee Rivers to the Gulf of Mexico which we will cross and end back in St. Petersburg. The Loop is typically done in this counter-clockwise manner in order to follow the currents when traveling the inland rivers. The Loop can be started anywhere on the route but the route is seasonal (following the warmer weather) as you want to be in Florida in the Winter, travel up the east coast in the Spring, be in Canada and on the Great Lakes in the Summer and travel the inland rivers in the Fall. It’s best to be on the Chesapeake Bay in May because the New York canals typically don’t open until June 1st. It is also a good idea to have made it through the Great Lakes and into Chicago by Labor Day due to fewer good weather windows on the lakes and facilities closing down for the winter. Finally, you don’t want to be too far south during the peak of hurricane season, which is generally sometime in November. A side trip to the Bahamas is sometimes included and something we hope to do after we have “crossed our wake” in St. Petersburg.
