Currently Away

How Two Disenchanted People Traveled the Great Loop for Nine Months and Returned to the Start, Energized and Optimistic

by Bruce Tate

The walls were closing in on Bruce and Maggie Tate. Isolation forced on them by the pandemic, combined with America’s growing political factionalism, threatened their bonds with community and family. Something had to change. Maggie’s surprising answer: buy a boat, learn to pilot it, and embark on the Great Loop. For nine months Bruce and Maggie navigated rivers, coastal waters, lakes, locks, and loss. Against all odds they conquered the Loop, and along the way found common cause across political divides with new friends while blowing the walls off their world.

Bruce and Maggie Tate were spiraling downward. Normally outgoing and cheerful, Maggie was broken down by pandemic isolation. Bruce, facing asthma, heart disease and Covid-related professional issues, was sure that the virus and his comorbidities would kill him. And the plant-based diet he had just started made him wish it would hurry up. Meanwhile, their country seemed to be crumbling into warring factions.

That was when Maggie made a life-changing decision. With no experience, knowing little about seafaring, inboard motors, or navigation, she and Bruce and the family dog decided to take on the Great Loop, a six-thousand-mile journey down inland rivers, around the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, and across the Great Lakes. They had to navigate canals and locks, were threatened by dangerous seas, and even had to deal with heartbreaking loss. But along the way, they made new lifelong friends and were forever changed.

When, in a time of great divisiveness, two broken people took on the challenge of their lives, against all odds they found common cause across political divides and made themselves whole again.

• Errata, typos, suggestions

Releases:

• P1.0 2023/12/12

• Foreword
• Preparations
  • You’re Going to Hit the Dock
  • From Perfectly Controlled to Spinning
  • Our 290-Square-Foot Quarantine
  • We Muster the Best Landing We Can
  • A Wild Prehistoric Trill
• To the Gulf
  • We Were Off
  • A Magic Portal
  • Four-Foot Waves Grew to Six
  • Friday Night Lights
  • Our Dog Let It Rain
  • An Arctic, Aquatic Groundhog Day
  • One Too Many Mississippi Mud Pies
  • Locks Are Dangerous Places
  • Mobile Bay Let Us Off Easy
• Florida
  • Are We Settlers or Locusts?
  • A Dolphin Almost Hit Me in the Face
  • The Best Crossings are the Boring Ones
  • Chum for the Great Sharks
  • Navy to the Core
  • The Great Burgee Hunt
  • Someone Else with a Bigger Boat
  • Don’t Feed the Gators
  • Our Party on Someone Else’s Boat
  • Things We Told Our Kids to Never Do
  • The Grace of a Drunken Goat
• Atlantic
  • Lined Up Like Lobster Tails
  • The Treadmill at the Cardio Lab
  • Swamp Minions Both Miserable and Lethal
  • From Dock to Dock and Bar to Bar
  • A Boat Sank There
  • Some Days, You Are the Show
• Canada
  • We Wondered Who Was Pranking Us
  • We Chuckled Condescendingly
  • She Was Gone
  • Shake Me Off This Board Game
  • Here We Go Then
  • I Want to Survive It
• Lake Michigan and the Rivers
  • Unsalted and Shark Free
  • The Hole
  • We Crossed Our Wake
  • Harder than Hangdog Inlet