The Great Loop

**Meriah and Evan Blakley aboard their boat Novella on the first day of their 6,000-mile journey.**

Part 1 of 2

“It definitely started with me,” said Evan Blakley of the voyage that he and his wife, Meriah, began on December 2 at Pickwick Landing, Tennessee.

That was the day the couple began the first leg of the “Great Loop,” which is a water voyage on continuous waterways that includes major rivers in the United States, Gulf Coast and East Coast waterways, the Great Lakes and Canadian Heritage Canals.

Evan is the former executive director of the Chamber & Development Council (CDC) of Crawford County.

Meriah, a graphic designer, is the owner of Roo Bea Design Co.; among her many clients are La Prensa Hispanic Newspaper and the Denison Free Press.

Evan first heard of the Great Loop on a podcast he discovered about two years ago.

“I’ve always been interested in sailing, and on a whim I started to look up sailing podcasts,” he said.

“I settled on one where a couple guests were talking about how they just completed the Great Loop; they described the way they cut their ties and started traveling full time, and this was one of the things they were going to do.”

Their voyage had also been an introductory course in sailing and boating, which they said was not advisable.

“Their story was really inspiring to me and the Great Loop was interesting, even though it’s not advisable to learn how to sail doing it,” Evan said.

“At that time, I had no idea if it was feasible for us to do, but it became something to daydream about. I mentioned it to Meriah; I was trying to convince her to start thinking about how we could live a life of adventure, and that’s really what I was craving at that point in my life.”

The Blakleys built their life around travel.

“Every time we go on vacation, he’s reading books about sailing or boating or ocean adventures,” Meriah said. “But I’m terrified of the open ocean. That’s scary – I don’t want to be out there.”

“No, we’re fine,” was her initial response to the idea.

“I always thought he just wanted to bob around in the ocean,” she said. “That’s what I thought he was talking about.”

When he first suggested selling their house and heading for the ocean, her answer was “Nope.”

“But then he started to talk about it more and more,” Meriah said. “I would hope more than anything that Evan gives this up. I just want him to stop talking to me about the ocean and stop talking to me about sailing, because I loved our house and enjoyed our life. I’d love to travel more, but I didn’t really think that was possible.”

When Evan suggested the idea again, Meriah decided to try to figure out why she was so opposed to it.

“I probably took a night to think about it and figure out what my apprehension really was,” Meriah said.

“I thought about it and I was like, ‘Guess what – we’re going.’ I didn’t want to be old one day and realize it was my fault that Evan never got to do the thing he was really passionate about.”

“At that point, it became real and she came back and had to convince me,” Evan said. “I would say, ‘What about this? What about this?’ She said it doesn’t matter – we’re going. She said, ‘this is your dream and it sounds like fun. You talked me into it, so you’d better figure out how we’re going.”

Story Ads 1

**The Blakleys borrowed space in a neighbor’s back yard to outfit their boat for a year-long journey.**

Evan gave six months notice at the CDC and joined Meriah at Roo Bea Design Co. to build a video production service for his next career.

In October 2022, they bought an inexpensive sailboat, located on Lake Michigan, on an eBay auction.

They borrowed space in a neighbor’s back yard to store the boat and began outfitting it this spring.

Evan added an 800-watt solar array, a Starlink internet antenna, and communications and navigation systems.

They named the boat Novella because of Evan’s love of reading seafaring adventure stories.

Novella is just 25 feet from bow to stern.

During the past summer, Evan and Meriah tested out the boat at Branched Oak Lake near Lincoln, Nebraska.

Beyond finding out whether it would float, they had to test out whether Meriah could continue to efficiently lay out the pages of the two newspapers, design their ads and take care of her other business needs while traveling on water.

The test went well and they moved forward with their plans to leave Denison at the end of November.

“It was a mad rush to get started,” Evan said. “We had a seasonal window that was going to close and we’d have to wait a whole year to start. That just wasn’t an option.”

A lot of steps were involved as they closed out their old lifestyle to step into the new one.

“At the same time I was transitioning careers, I was outfitting this boat for a journey it wasn’t intended for,” he said.

The Blakleys sold their house on November 30, but they had already left Denison a week before then, and launched Novella in Tennessee on November 27.

After spending six days making final preparations, they set off on the Great Loop; their planned voyage will take them to Mobile, Alabama, along the Florida Gulf Coast, up the East Coast to New York City, to Canada, across the Great Lakes and then back down the river systems of the Midwest.

Read about the first weeks of the Blakley’s journey in next week’s Denison Free Press.