SMALL BOAT, BIG LOOP

Cruising the Great Loop is one of the ultimate American adventures for the right sailboat

- BIANCA DUMAS

We were cruising down the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, the canal that links Pickwick Lake in Mississippi with Mobile Bay in Alabama. It was November. The sky was gray, and some of the raindrops were starting to resemble snow flurries. The captain was dressed head to heel in gray wool. I was in pink, equally bundled. We stood in the open cockpit of our Nor'Sea 27, insulated mugs of coffee in hand, and sang sea shanties while the captain steered by tiller.

We'd taught our kids these songs on a weekend trip through the desert when they were little. We had sung "Farewell Nova Scotia" as we pulled away from Hovenweep National Monument, chanted "Cape Cod Girls" as we passed through Monument Valley, and learned every line to "All for Me Grog" as we gazed at the red rocks of Moab, Utah. At that time, my husband was a newly obsessed sailor, and we kept our first sailboat on the Great Salt Lake.

Thirteen boats passed us that day on the Tenn-Tom, but we were the only sailboat. The rest were trawlers and motoryachts, all of their captains steering from enclosed and heated flybridges. We were all flying the swallow-tailed burgee of the America's Great Loop Cruisers' Association, and we were all going to spend the next year or so on the Great Loop, a 6,000-mile route around the eastern United States.

That is where the similarities ended. Ours was not the kind of boat-an open-cockpit sailboat with its mast upthat most people expected to see on the route. Most Loopers didn't know what to think of us, and most other sailors were headed to the Bahamas, not to Chicago the long way around via the Intracoastal Waterway and the Erie Canal.

But Sonny got it. He waved and honked from the enclosed flybridge of his Mainship 40 trawler as he passed. Later, when we met on the docks in Columbus, Mississippi, he told us how happy he had been to see us.