For most of their adult lives, April and Larry Smith had very little knowledge about boating. Aside from short stints on vessels when they were in their 20s—with April serving as a crew member on an 86-foot yawl in Marina Del Rey and Larry spending 9 months as first mate on a 43-foot trimaran—the couple hadn’t spent much time on the water at all. They were in their 60s and living on their 10-acre horse ranch in California when they almost decided to buy a sailing catamaran to keep in the British Virgin Islands. Then they heard about the Great Loop and their boating plans changed.
“We ended up buying a 52-foot Hatteras, because the sailing catamaran is not your usual Great Loop boat,” April explains. “But the whole time we were doing the Loop on the Hatteras, we still wanted to have
