The Great Loop

**After enduring cold temperatures for the first few weeks of their trip south, the Blakleys were relieved by the summer-like temperatures of Mobile, Alabama.**

Part 2 of 2

Evan and Meriah Blakley sold their house in Denison at the end of November and headed for Tennessee with their 25-foot boat, Novella.

On December 2, they cast off from Pickwick Landing, Tennessee, to begin their 6,000-mile voyage on “The Great Loop,” which will take them to the Gulf of Mexico, around Florida, up the East Coast, through the Great Lakes and Canadian Heritage Canals, and back into the Midwest.

The journey does not include a lot of time on open water far from land.

“Typically, you are in a river, you are in the Intracoastal Waterway, you’re in a bay,” Evan said.

“There’s one point where you have to cross the gulf and there are a couple of options on how long your crossing will be. For us, it looks like we’re going to do daylight crossings only, which could put us about 20 to 30 miles, at most, offshore. When you get up to New Jersey, you do have to go outside into the Atlantic for some time to get up to New York City.”

Some potential routes across the Great Lakes may also take Novella away from shore.

“But that represents a very small percentage of the entire trip,” Evan said. “Most of the time, we’re within at least a semi-protected waterway.”

Safety was a primary concern when planning the voyage.

“You’re always within range of a Coast Guard radio receiving station, you’re always within range of other vessels that could assist,” Evan said. “We have a membership with TowBoatUS, so if we ever got stuck, we’d have a free tow to get us wherever we need to be.”

The Blakleys have a dinghy, named Puff, that can serve as a life raft if anything happens to Novella.

“There are only two or three times where we’ll be making a crossing where we are not within sight of land,” Evan said. “Most of the time, you’re within sight and you could swim to land.”

A 6,000-mile water voyage will inevitably include times when they will be out of their comfort zone.

“Some things could turn into dangerous situations if you’re not prepared,” he said. “That’s why you have to study, learn, read from all sorts of sources to know how to handle all the different things that can happen, and have a plan for what you do in those scenarios.”

Evan said he and Meriah anticipated that they would have many lessons to learn during the first weeks on the water.

One of the first things they learned was that they needed checklists.

“There are so many things to do when you come to a dock, when you leave a dock, when you hoist your sails, when you start your motor; there are all kinds of steps involved and it’s very easy to forget something that makes life difficult later,” Evan said.

They also had to learn how to live on a 25-foot boat.

“There is endless reorganizing and moving of things to get to something else,” he said. “Whether you’re making coffee or cooking dinner or getting ready in the morning, everything is organized and put away somewhere.”

Most “Loopers” make the voyage on much larger boats, he noted.

“They basically have every luxury you would have in a house; we have those things, too, for the most part, but on a much smaller and more simple scale,” Evan said.

“I’m still trying to wrap my head around everything because we’ve been working on this for so long, but also everything kind of came together at the last minute,” Meriah said.

She spends much of her time below deck working on jobs for clients of her company, Roo Bea Design Co.

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**The appearance of dolphins signaled a change in the weather and a fresh outlook for Meriah and Evan.**

Their first weeks on the water were too cold for both of them.

“While Meriah works below and I am outside motoring, I’ll call her up to see the sights; come up and look at these birds, come look at these cliffs along the river; this is really beautiful,” Evan said. “She’d pop her head out and take a picture and go back below and go back to work. She’s absolutely right – it’s been way colder than we could have imagined.”

He said the trip would have been a lot more enjoyable if the temperatures had been higher.

“There’ve been long times of not-enjoyable motoring down a river 100% exposed – with no autopilot – just 100% hand-steering the whole time,” Evan said. “It’s kind of like driving a car for 11 hours a day, except you’re driving a boat and the scenery’s different.”

They had visited Pickwick Landing at Christmas in 2022 and spent their time in short sleeves; when they arrived a year later to begin their journey, they were confronted with temperatures in the 20s and 30s.

“We just have a little Walmart heater because you have to buy the smallest thing you can,” he said. “We were trying to outrun the cold at every turn and it just wasn’t really happening most of the way down the river.”

Cold or not, they still found enjoyment during the first weeks on the water.

“There are little moments of intense beauty that we could not have imagined,” Evan said. “We were docked in Fulton, Mississippi, and I had no hopes for that place to be anything remarkable. We were docked next to flooded timber with all these tree trunks sticking out from the water just feet from our dock. We could see the stars perfectly and the sunsets there were absolutely amazing. We just figured it was a cheap place to stop when we headed downriver, and it ended up being one of our favorite marinas.”

A positive distraction on their voyage is Tildy, their 13-year-old cat.

“I found her in a parking lot before her eyes were even open. She was bottle fed and toted along wherever we went,” Meriah said. “She is a very laid-back cat and we thought she would be well-suited for boat life.”

Tildy has always been fascinated by water and adjusted effortlessly when Meriah and Evan took her on their test cruises last summer.

Meriah said Tildy naps most of the day on their trip.

“She comes out typically once we anchor to explore around the boat,” she said.

They have to keep an eye on her because she likes to explore other boats, as well.

“More than anything, she likes to be held and petted. She is incredibly snuggly,” Meriah said. “It is nice having her along – she makes the boat feel like home.”

The coldest day of the first part of the Blakleys’ trip was on the last leg to Mobile, Alabama.

“I kept having to ask Meriah to come out and steer so I could go down below and warm my hands over the stove we have,” Evan said. “Then I’d go back out for an hour and come back in and warm my hands.”

The big payoff came when they arrived in Mobile two days before Christmas.

“It was like a switch had been turned and it was summer,” he said.

“As soon as we got into the bay, it opened up and the sun was shining, and the boat was surrounded by a small pod of dolphins,” Meriah said. “It was almost like they were out there waiting for us. It made everything worth it.”

“That was the turning point when it really felt more like what we had imagined,” Evan said.

“Pelicans were flying by – I swear one almost hit me with his wing,” Meriah said. “I’m an animal lover, so anytime I can see animals in the wild, it’s thrilling to me. Then we saw a shrimp. I’ve never seen a shrimp in the wild.”

“It swam right up to our boat,” Evan said.

“They’re adorable,” Meriah said.

“One large reason we’re doing this is we love to be outdoors, we love to be active and see nature,” Evan said. “We’re hopeful that this trip opens up year-round outdoor activity.”

The Blakleys departed Mobile on December 27 and reached Florida three days later.

“We plan to be stationed in St. Augustine (Florida) at the end of winter for a week or two and wait for the temperatures to rise, and then we’ll head up the coast and follow the spring temperatures up,” Evan said. “By the time summer hits, we’d like to be in New York City.”

You can follow the Blakleys’ journey at Sailing Novella on Facebook and Sailingnovella on Intsagram.