Our On Board Life: A Love Story About Two Rookie Boaters Living the Dream, Loving the Lifestyle, and Learning Everything from Scratch

By Darrell Grob

It is rare when someone gets to actually live their dream, but Skipper Darrell did! Follow him, along with his wife, on their good ship Why Knot, as they cruise America's Great Loop, America's greatest boating adventure. It's not a guide book or travelogue, but a collection of the best stories of their adventure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Darrell Grob
• Release date: May 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311160324

Darrell Grob

As a writer, I like to keep things light. My travel books (always G-rated) are fun and informative. I like to think that I present my area of interest from a different point of view. My fiction can be intense at times, with colorful characters in interesting situations. And I'm not kidding when I say they're R-rated. They are for mature adult readers ONLY. Women and men can enjoy them equally. My career background is in business management, sales, sales management, business development strategies, and corporate soft skills training. I was also what you could call a professional change instigator. (aka, shit disturber with a purpose.) I must admit, to say I'm retired is somewhat of a lie. I'm as busy now as ever with things I enjoy a helluva lot more than wearing ties and making sure my wingtips are polished, not to mention putting up with other people's shit. My wife, Lisa, and I have been full-time, active, cruising boaters for six years. We've been all over the Eastern Seaboard, Chesapeake Bay, the Great Lakes, the Western Rivers, The Gulf of Mexico, and the Florida Keys. It's a great life. We're very fortunate. CONTACT INFORMATION For more information about us and what we have done, including over 1,000 pictures, go to www.whyknotonthegreatloop.com, which focuses on our exploits, and www.theonboardlife.com, which is more about the lifestyle. They're active and updated frequently. [e-mail] Twitter@skipperdarrell

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Our On Board Life

A Love Story About Two Rookie Boaters Living the Dream, Loving the Lifestyle, and Learning Everything From Scratch

By

Darrell T. Grob

© 2014 Darrell T. Grob

ISBN-9781495977107

Revised August 2017

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please return to Smashwordsd and purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

About Me – Darrell T. Grob

Contact Information

Dedication

Forward

The Great Loop January, 2012 – April, 2013

Chapter 1 The Genesis Of All This Madness

Chapter 2 Ship Shopping In Sarasota

Chapter 4 Crazy Key West, Mon!

Chapter 5 Why Not Why Knot?

Chapter 6 So Many Details, So Much Stuff

Chapter 7 Getting Underway For The First Time

Chapter 8 School Was In Session

Chapter 9 The Collective Looper Conscientiousness

Chapter 10 Annapolis - Very Cool. We Love It!

Chapter 11 The Old Mail Bag

Chapter 12 Sea Life, Vermin And Critters

Chapter 13 Canada – Part One - The Trent-Severn Waterway

Chapter 14 Canada – Part Two - Georgian Bay And

North Channel

Chapter 15 Shore Leave

Chapter 16 Mission Rules

Chapter 17 Marinas – Your Marketing Needs Some Help

Chapter 18 Wannabees, I'm Your Pal.

Chapter 19 The Crossing – Part One - Getting There

Chapter 20 The Crossing – Part Two – Final Exam

Chapter 21 Back To Where Our Great Loop Adventure

Really Started

Chapter 22 The End Game

Chapter 23 Great Loop Superlatives

Summer Cruising Season 2013

Chapter 24 We Got Our Gold Burgee! Now What?

Chapter 25 3 – 2 – 1 Blast Off!!!

Chapter 26 The Saga Of Jekyll Island – Nice Place To Have A Near-Disaster

Chapter 27 Uncle Dick?! Can We Go A Little Faster?!

Chapter 28 Bald Head Island – It Pays To Get Off Of The Line

Chapter 29 The Big, Bad Pamlico Sound

Chapter 30 Annapolis, Again – Still Cool And We Still Love It

Chapter 31 The Art And Mystery Of Being A Tourist

Chapter 32 The Supposed Mystical Eastern Shore

Chapter 33 Washington, Whitaker, Myrtle Beach And Mold

Chapter 34 It's The People

Chapter 35 The Bottom Line

Epilogue

ABOUT ME – DARRELL T. GROB

My career background is in business management, sales, sales management, business development strategies, and corporate soft skills training. I was also what you could call a professional change instigator. (aka, shit disturber with a purpose.) I'm semi-retired now. That means that if a consulting contract offer came along that looked like an interesting challenge, I'd get a haircut, spiff up my wardrobe and dig in. (I won't, however, wear a tie! Semi-retirement has its perks.)

Lisa is my wife. She and I have been together off and on for 30 years and, as you will read later in this book, I finally got it through my thick head that being off and on wasn't going to cut it anymore.

I have two grown sons, Bryan and Kevin. They are both single, have good jobs, and are very good young men. (Ladies, please line up in an orderly fashion. No butting or shoving in line.)

You will read that I'm a proud St. Louisan. My rooting priorities are the Cardinals (MLB), then the Blues (NHL) and the Rams (NFL). I'm writing this book with one eye pointed at landlocked people as an audience. For instance, Lisa is a native Coloradan. Coloradans (Nebraskans, Dakotans, New Mexicans, Wyomingites, Montanans, etc.) have no reality about boating like this. Maybe reading this book will help them to see something new.

I'm also a three-chord hack ukulele player. I'm told I can be very entertaining.

If you would like to contact me about anything, please don't hesitate to do so. My email address is [e-mail]. I love to talk, as you might have already surmised.

Thanks for taking time from your life to read this book. I hope you enjoy it.

CONTACT INFORMATION

For more information about us and what we have done, including over 1,000 pictures, go to www.whyknotonthegreatloop.com, which focuses on our exploits, and www.theonboardlife.com, which is more about the lifestyle. They're active and updated frequently.

Email [e-mail]

Twitter @skipperdarrell

DEDICATION

Lisa is my best friend, my wife and the admiral of our crew. She and I have been together off and on for almost thirty years and she has, more than anyone else, completely understood me. She and I have always shared a love that while I didn't always understand or appreciate it (and at some times failed to notice it) she never, ever abandoned me nor judged me. I owe so much to her. I owe my life to her. This memoir is dedicated to her. My soul and my dreams have always been safe with her.

FORWARD

This book is a love story sneakily disguised as a book about boating.

It's first about how I love our on board lifestyle, that is living on board our trusty and comfortable boat much of the last two years and actively traveling along just about any waterway we can get to. I love everything about this lifestyle. I love our boat, Why Knot, and the way the Caterpillar 3208 diesel engine thunders to life at the press of a button, making the boat vibrate and shake ever slightly before settling into its deep throaty purr. I love bouncing from cabin to cabin and deck to deck. I love going to new places. I love the challenge of being the skipper of our boat and managing all of the aspects of it. I love sunsets out on the water. I love all of the people that we have met, especially the other loopers and boaters; the best people in the world. And I love being a gold looper, someone that has successfully completed the Great Loop, America's greatest boating adventure, and the sense of accomplishment I feel for taking on and conquering such a formidable task.

An on board life is a fantastic life! It's a better life. It's an exciting life. It's a challenging life. To put it bluntly, I get off on it. For those with any kind of adventuresome spirit that needs to be satisfied, getting on a boat and cruising around the U.S., especially cruising the Great Loop, is a terrific fix. And for every degree someone's old way of life may be dragging their spirit down, a boating life will lift it up ten fold.

But more important than all of that, this is a love story between myself and Lisa, my wife, best friend, crew and admiral.

As I look back at my life, using boating jargon, I can see how my route planning was pretty lousy. I had destinations in mind, but the choices I made to get to them weren't all that good. I would sometimes choose waypoints that were way out of the way or, at minimum, they didn't make for the most direct route. Or sometimes I would get stuck on restrictive routes that took me away from where I really wanted to be, without even the option to change course. This is what it had been like for the almost 30 years that Lisa and I have known each other. I always knew that wherever she was was where I really wanted to be (or should have been), but I couldn't get to her. But we did, at least, always have bearings on where each other was.

Here's what happened. As you will read in the first chapter, The Genesis of All This Madness, our discovery of this lifestyle evolved over time. With the discovery of the Great Loop every part of our beings locked onto it...cruising the Great Loop became our focal point. Now, during the early days of all that discovery, Lisa and I were in totally different life circumstances. Heck, we weren't even in the same state. But the appeal of the new and exciting possibilities of this crazy idea, to be loopers, was so great to us, we decided together that this was worth going through a lot of personal change to make happen. And we are so glad that we did. Living this wonderful life together came at important times in our lives and, speaking for both of us, it has made us a stronger, more loving, more forgiving and more empowered couple. Having this strong common dream, this choice, and these goals, cleared the way for us to finally navigate to each other.

This is not a travelogue, how-to book, or guide. Frankly, I have worked diligently to not make this like the many other books about the subject. (Day 1 we were here. Day 2 we were here. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.) This is a collection of our best stories about our first two years (2012 & 2013) of being live-aboard boating enthusiasts, from total greenhorn rookies to where we are now, especially of our Great Loop adventure. And while we are by no means experts I hope you will see that we have made measurable progress in a reasonable amount of time.

Some of these stories are location specific, some are quirky excursions into personal opinion writing, some are from my own unique (again, quirky would seem to work as an adjective) point of view, but all come from my heart. It's about how it all started, what motivated us, how it progressed, what things had the biggest impact on us, what we saw, and how it changed our lives, all through the filter of my imagination and expressive abilities. And in this context I hope that it has value for readers.

So, here goes. Welcome aboard our love boat.

THE GREAT LOOP JANUARY, 2012 – APRIL, 2013

CHAPTER 1 THE GENESIS OF ALL THIS MADNESS

How did we come to a point in our lives where we felt it was necessary to throw the past overboard, buy a big boat, and jump into this new on board lifestyle? Was it some burning bush moment with fire from on high? Was it me hearing the voice of God directing me to do it? Was it some psychotic machination that I dreamed up and followed? No. One thing lead to another, then to another, then to another... It just kind of happened.

I was a water bug as a kid. I was a good swimmer and I loved being around any body of water, whether it was a swimming pool, river, lake or pond. When I was a kid my family spent a lot of time at the Lake of the Ozarks in south central Missouri where we would haul our beautiful wooden Chris Craft outboard runabout for several weekends during the summer boating season. I can still clearly remember slicing through the water while seeing only a few other boats out with us. We favored the waters as far away from Bagnell Dam as we could get as my dad liked it when he had a lot of room to maneuver and not have to deal with other boaters. (That was a long time ago. Lake of the Ozarks is now considered to be one of the most dangerous bodies of water in the U.S. The boating is beyond the safe capacity of the lake and the boat operators seem to be insanely reckless.)

There used to be a summer camp in the Missouri Ozarks called Camp Zoe, near the town of Eminence. It was on a beautiful river called Sinking Creek and I spent every summer there for five years enjoying all of the activities that it had to offer. I guess you could say I was a hot shot summer camper, one of the old pros that the young kiddies looked up to. A lot of the activities revolved around that creek. Whether it was swimming or canoeing, if it was in or on Sinking Creek I was in on the action. I was even qualified to go on extended float trips on the Current River, a bigger, more challenging river, into which Sinking Creek emptied. I can remember being part of paddling crews on the camp's longer, heavier aluminum john boats. God, I loved Camp Zoe.

Throughout the following years, after the Chris Craft was gone, my family spent large chunks of the summers on extended camping and float trips, mostly on, again, the Current River. Hell, we even had our own seventeen foot Grumman aluminum canoe.

As a child I had an interest in the PT boats of World War II (still do), my favorite movies were naval movies and as a young adult I got within a hair’s width of enlisting in the U.S. Coast Guard. (I regret not going through with that.) I did get some experience power boating as an adult. But it was never enough. I wanted to be out on the water...a lot!

As the years went by, the drive for me to get into some kind of boating came naturally and grew more intense. But figuring out how to do it was a challenge. I wasn’t too interested in a runabout. I always drove small cars so trailering a boat wasn't possible. I did a little sailing which had its pleasures, but the St. Louis region isn't a good sailing area, being restricted to nearby medium size lakes or Alton Lake, a Mississippi River pool just north of St. Louis. And again, trailering was a challenge.

What I really wanted to do was to go places. In my mind I settled on long range cruising on the thousands of miles of the western waterways, which is the Mississippi River and all of the rivers that empty into it. If that was the case the kind of boat I needed was a houseboat. In my research I found that there were lots of capable houseboats available at reasonable prices and there were lots of destinations to go to. I was going to be a river rat.

Now, Lisa...she's a native Coloradan; a Denverite, to be exact. The only boating that is found to any degree in Colorado is white-water rafting or kayaking, and she had never done any of that. Actually, she never did any kind of boating. It just wasn't part of her upbringing in Colorado. Frankly, she can't even swim all that well. She says that she could count all the times that she had even been on a boat on one hand and still have fingers left over to count something else. But she was enthusiastic about our plans. We both shared the same dream – to be live-aboard boaters, seeing beautiful things and going to beautiful places.. We were totally in synch together. We fell in love with the idea of having an on board life

Now, in this research about being a river rat I realized we could boat all the way down from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico on what is called the Tombigbee Waterway, a waterway of rivers, lakes and canals that connect the Mississippi River via the Ohio River to Mobile, Alabama. Then I thought that if we can get to Mobile and the Gulf, couldn’t we then go to Florida? Well, yes we could! But I learned that a traditional flat-hulled houseboat was not the right type of boat for that kind of open water cruising. What we were looking for was a trawler with a full or semi displacement hull, economical diesel power, large fuel capacity and full live-aboard capabilities – a versatile kind of boat matched well for the wide variety of boating conditions we would encounter. As I researched these kinds of boats I stumbled on the two words that changed everything. Those two words were great and loop. I discovered The Great Loop. And after much consideration we decided that we would take on cruising the Great Loop and become loopers.

Let me explain what The Great Loop is. If you include all of the ocean shorelines, rivers, canals, lakes and other waterways, the eastern U.S. (and a chunk of Canada) is an island. The Great Loop is the charted route around this island. Every year there are several dozen boats with their gallant crews out there navigating the route in either easy to digest chunks, making frequent and sometimes extended shore leaves thus taking years to complete their loop, or taking time out of their busy lives to enjoy the experience from start to finish. This latter group is where we would fit in.

If you look at a map of the U.S.A. starting in southern Florida, let’s say at Fort Lauderdale, run your finger up the east coast. At New York City run it up through Lake Ontario straight north from Oswego, New York into Canada. Then sweep your finger in an arc over Toronto (It looks like it’s all land but it’s not.), Lake Erie and Lake Huron over to where Lake Michigan meets up with Lake Huron. Then go down Lake Michigan on either the western or eastern shore. (Most loopers go down the eastern shore.) Then starting at the Illinois River run your finger down to the Mississippi River. Continue on the Mississippi, cheating east a tad on the Ohio River. At Kentucky Lakes continue down to Mobile, Alabama. Then run your finger around the southern tip of Florida until you are back to where you started. That in a nutshell is the Great Loop. The route is anywhere from 5,000 statute miles to much greater lengths. (Our loop was 5,551 miles long. That seems to be the norm.) Some boats travel as many as 10,000 miles to do their loop. This is because many use the Great Loop route as sort of a template to access a myriad of side trips to many wonderful locations. An example of a side trip that we did was to cruise up the Potomac River to visit Washington, D.C. Our loop began in January, 2012 and ended in April, 2013.

Frankly we became obsessed about learning what the Great Loop was all about. Like many who catch the bug one of the first resources to be drooled over is a wonderful book entitled Honey, Let's Get a Boat... A Cruising Adventure of America's Great Loop by Ron and Eva Stob. I ended up reading it in just two or three sittings. After that we latched onto any published or online resource we could get our hands on. Lisa was just as interested in it all as I was. She even one-upped me in some areas. Her thing was navigation. She bought the tools and the resources needed to get that all down pat. She even bought and learned how to use a sextant.

All of this research started sometime in 2006. So with our actual departure being in 2012 this time of discovery lasted six years! We read everything we could. We looked at hundreds of boats online. We uncovered every detail that we could, all while we were still working. But as time went on things began to become more concrete in our minds. We learned that this was more than just about acquiring and using a physical boat. This was a lifestyle choice. Cruising the Great Loop was a commitment to a bigger thing.

So, we had all of the ingredients for a major lifestyle change. It's all there. But we were missing a tiny bit of a catalyst. It was kind of like baking – we had all of the ingredients in the mixing bowl, but we hadn't added any yeast yet. We had whole new perspectives of how we saw what we wanted our lives to be like. And the more we saw in our mind's eye what a great way of life an on board life could be, and what this new and exciting lifestyle could mean to us, well, we became more dissatisfied with the status quo. We decided to do something about it. We totally bought into a new paradigm of how we wanted to live. This total mental and emotional buy-in was the catalyst. Once that was added to the recipe the outcome of us actually doing this was inevitable.

We knew that we were capable of doing something amazing if we were totally committed to it, maintained our personal motivation, became students of it and kept our heads on straight.

So, we were going to buy a boat, learn how to be boaters, learn how to live the lifestyle and cruise the Great Loop. That is how it all began.

CHAPTER 2 SHIP SHOPPING IN SARASOTA

We reached a critical mass in our water-bound thinking. We had the plan, the resources and wherewithal to make things happen. We were committed to this new lifestyle and the challenges and rewards of undertaking it. As competent business people we worked exhaustively at examining and understanding as many of the facets of becoming loopers and cruising the Great Loop that we could. But we were missing one essential thing...a boat.

Boats come in a mind-numbingly wide array of configurations, each having their own benefits and disadvantages compared to the mission, conditions and lifestyle choices of potential owners. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all boat. We found that having only a few important musts for our boat to be helpful. For us these were a single diesel engine, full displacement hull, a full walk a-round deck, a center berth aft cabin (that means that the bed is centered in the cabin rather than offset to either the port or starboard side of the boat), a flybridge and an aft sundeck.

As with most boat shoppers nowadays we spent many hours online going through all of the boats listed on the several online boat sales websites. We looked at least a hundred different boats of different configurations located all over the eastern and southeastern United States. The boat we settled on to pursue was named Dunwurkin and it was located in Sarasota, Florida. The main features that we were looking for were all there. However, its condition was difficult to ascertain. The available pictures of it were incomplete and of poor quality. The listing agent was Charlie Pendergrass of American Marine Exports in Palmetto, Florida. (Palmetto is just north of Sarasota and Bradenton.)

We frequently get asked how we finally came to the point