Great Loopers sail through New Eastside

For Charles and Quinton Hagen, a 5,000-mile journey began with a single $6 dinner at Mariano’s.

“Every dollar counts,” said Charles, of Two Rivers, WI, who along with 12-year-old son Quinton is sailing “America’s Great Loop,” a circumnavigational waterway along the Eastern U.S. The Hagens were among a handful of “Loopers” scrambling for the Chicago River before the weather turned for the worst.

“This is the latest I necessarily remember still having boats on the Great Lakes,” said Kimberly Russo of America’s Great Loop Cruisers’ Association (AGLCA), an organization that helps boaters safely navigate the route.

The scenic but challenging Great Loop — open to anyone with a sense of adventure — starts in Florida in spring and sees boaters through Chicago by September.

From Chicago, the counterclockwise route dips through six Central states before depositing Loopers in the Gulf of Mexico. The route then swings right, hugging western Florida and the Atlantic Coast all the way up to New York City, where Lady Liberty looks on as Loopers turn northward up the Hudson.

Once boaters reach the International Peace Bridge in Canada it’s still nearly 900 miles through a complicated system of locks, rivers, channels, and lakes, to reach Chicago.

While changing tides, swift currents, tricky maps, and low bridges might deter some boaters, Loopers feel an irresistible pull to glide past Civil War cemeteries, historic cities, and pristine nature reserves.

“[The Great Loop] has meaning, it has value, there’s something to it,” said Charles Hagen, who like many Loopers plans to take about a year to navigate the route. “It’s not Disneyworld.”

“The kids are really seeing where history actually happened, instead of reading it in a book, and they’re having a great time,” says Russo.

According to Russo, about 300 boats are out on the Loop at any given time, but only 100 or so complete the whole circuit each year. Those who do complete the route receive a special flag from the AGLCA (and lifelong bragging rights).

For Charles Hagen, who got waylaid by technical issues in Racine, WI, doing the Great Loop means life has finally come full circle—even if it meant starting in October storms.

“I thought about doing the Great Loop for a long time,” says Hagen, 53, who walks with a cane and suffers from PTSD as a result of an Air Force accident in 1985. “I could have been homeless, but now I’m here to tell veterans, ‘If I can do the Great Loop, they can too.’”

Hagen says he got the idea to complete the Great Loop after watching YouTube videos of other families on the trip. A stern warning from his doctor pushed him out of the office — and into Plan B, his recently acquired Catalina sailboat.

“My doctor said I needed to do whatever I could to get my stress down,” says Hagen, who set sail from Manitowoc Harbor on Oct. 18 and arrived in Monroe Harbor Oct. 25. Accompanying Hagen is his service dog, Murphy. Murphy reminds Hagen to take his medication in the morning, and gently licks him awake if he has nightmares.

“I wake up and see her and go ‘nightmare, all right,’” says Hagen. “She gives me a sense of control over it. She has this uncanny ability to seem to know me better than I do.”

Just in front of the Hagens will be fiftysomething couple Mike and Claiborne Ryan, of Charleston, S.C., in their newly purchased Karma. With its creamy leather seats, teak finishes and quadruple GPS systems, the 47-foot yacht seems ready to handle whatever fate rolls its way.

“On the Mississippi, we’ll be watching out for debris and traffic,” says Mike, “but at the end of the day, you float with the traffic.”

Mike and Claiborne plan to hire a skipper from Chicago to St. Louis, along the Illinois River, to help orient them to the boat.

“[Mike and I] are in discussions about divvying up responsibilities,” laughs Claiborne, who says she’s looking forward to relaxing yoga sessions in Karma’s flybridge.

Mike says he’s unfazed at falling a month and a half “behind schedule,” due to a drawn-out process purchasing Karma.

“We’re timing things just right,” Mike said, smiling. “We’ll get a lot of fall foliage.”

— Tricia Parker