The East Coast is an Island

Circling the Great Loop

A dock hand tosses our stern lines, and I move to the front deck, slipping the bow lines off pilings. Glen gooses the engines, first one then the other, playing the throttles so the stern clears the dock. It is early Sunday morning, and sun lightens the root beer-colored water on the mile-wide Caloosahatchee River. Traveling at 8 knots, we head eastward under motor, away from the Gulf of Mexico and boat traffic of Fort Myers. Without fanfare, the water beneath us has changed from an ocean to the Okeechobee Waterway, a 154-mile route across the rural middle of Florida.

A canal across Florida that connects the Gulf of Mexico with the Atlantic Ocean. A peaceful waterway though miles of untouched Florida Everglades and ranchland. Manatees use it too!

Looking back at our small wake, I feel satisfied. We are making progress on the Great Loop. There are 6,000–7,000-miles ahead on our counterclockwise circumnavigation of the eastern United States. Landlocked friends, some sketchy on the length of the Atlantic coast, had been nudging us in emails, “Why are you still in Florida? When do you start the Great Loop?”

In our minds we were already traveling the Loop. For us, the Great Loop started six months earlier, when we woke up in our mountain cabin and decided it was now or never to experience the great circle within America. It had been a…