Perspective
A Year Out of the Loop
Pediatrics gets placed on hold as a physician and her family explore the waterways of the eastern United States.
By Sarah O. "Sally" Colwell, M.D.
Starting in August of 2006, I spent 54 weeks cruising the Great Loop, a waterway that circles the eastern United States, with my husband and two teenaged sons. It was an incredible year of exploring new places, spending time together as a family, slowing down, and living a life that was very different from that of a pediatrician.
The story of how I came to spend more than a year on a boat really began in 1989, when I married Jeff Janacek—a man with five canoes. I knew Jeff had a passion for water and boats, but I thought it was for quiet, human-powered craft. Then in 1996, he came home with a used 40-horse outboard motor and, soon after, we bought our first 16-foot fishing boat. The 16-foot boat turned into a 19-footer. That was followed by a used 26-foot coastal cruiser, on which we traveled from the north end of Vancouver Island up the Inside Passage to Sitka, Alaska, in the summer of 2003.
Jeff and I keep “life lists” of things we’ve done and want to do. After the Alaska trip, he added “doing the Great Loop” to his. The Great Loop or Great Circle Route is more than 5,000 miles of protected waters made up of central river systems, the Intracoastal Waterways of the Gulf of Mexico and the East Coast of the United States, the Erie Canal and the Heritage Canals of Canada, and the Great Lakes. About 500 boats are on the Loop every year, cruising all or part of it. Most are trawlers, but some are sailboats, small cuddy cabin cruisers, and yachts able to pass under a 19-foot bridge in Chicago.
Jeff’s idea was for us to do this after our boys, now 17 and 15, left for college. I proposed doing it as a family instead. I thought the year David was in the 10th grade and Adam in the eighth was the one in which we could pull them both out of school with the least disruption to their academic and social lives. We started figuring out how to make it happen.
The Boat
We knew we needed a different boat. The boys had grown a lot since the Alaska trip, so we had to find a larger and more fuel-efficient vessel than our 26-footer. Jeff started looking for a boat that would run on diesel, go only 8 knots (9 miles) per hour to save on fuel, and had room for four. On the Internet, he found a Monk 36 trawler in Chesapeake Bay. After a Presidents’ Day weekend trip to Washington, D.C., and Maryland in 2005, we returned home the proud owners of the boat. We renamed it “Adirondack” after my favorite place in the world, the Adirondack Mountains of New York, where my family has a century-old summer house.
In May of that year, Jeff and a friend drove east and started getting the boat ready, outfitting it with an inflatable dinghy, dishes, pots and pans, and all the other things we would need to live on board. They left the dock and headed north up the Chesapeake Bay, along the New Jersey coast, and up the Hudson River. The boys and I met them in Albany, New York, for a trial cruise that took us through the Erie Canal, onto lakes Ontario and Huron, through the locks at Sault Ste. Marie to Lake Superior and Bayfield, Wisconsin, where we would keep the boat and have it in charter to help us pay for it.
Preparing to Leave
We spent the next year getting charts and books for the trip, updating the electronics—including adding a new color GPS chart plotter, and figuring out what it would take to step off the treadmill that was our lives. Retired from law enforcement, Jeff works part time at the West Marine store in Stillwater, where he is paid to talk about boats and can use his employee discount toward boating parts and supplies. He has a 100-ton Coast Guard license, which means he knows a lot about boats and can captain large vessels for pay. Taking a year off for this trip wasn’t a problem for him.
For me, it wasn’t so easy. I am a pediatrician at the HealthEast Maplewood Clinic. I requested a leave of absence and was granted the time off, though I took a risk, as the clinic’s patient volume would determine if they would need me when we returned. HealthEast hired two new physicians when I left, both of whom helped fill in for me at the clinic among their other duties. My patients and partners were all very supportive of our trip. I hung a poster of our route in the waiting room, so they could track our progress.
Both of our boys are good students and voracious readers. Our older son, David, would be a high school sophomore the year we would be away. His school wanted him to have an official high school transcript for the year, so he enrolled in Minnesota Online High School, a charter school. With a laptop computer and a Verizon air card, he was good to go. Adam, our younger son, would be an eighth grader. His middle school principal realized that Adam would learn a lot on the trip and only gave him a math book to study. He plowed through algebra, we visited lots of museums and Civil War battlefields, and he read a wide range of offerings on history, science, and literature. Adam proudly tells everyone he taught himself eighth grade.
We listed our house on a number of college and university websites and were able to rent it for the year to a pair of physicians from Sweden and their three children. The father was doing post-doc work in radiology at the University of Minnesota and the mother, an ob/gyn, was writing her dissertation. Our two cats were placed in foster care with Jeff’s daughter, and a friend volunteered to help us with our mail. We paid bills and did all our banking online and kept in touch with everyone by cell phone, email, and through our blogs. Our families and friends knew more about our day-to-day lives while we were on the boat than they do when we are home in Minnesota.
The Trip
We left the dock in Bayfield, on the western end of Lake Superior, on August 5, 2006. We were finally on our way. We traveled east along the south shore of the lake, passed through our first lock at Sault Ste. Marie, and entered Lake Michigan. We spent a wonderful few days on Mackinac Island before continuing along the east coast of Michigan, to Chicago. We spent the week after Labor Day tied up a block from Millennium Park, paying a dollar a foot ($36) a night to be in downtown Chicago!
After cruising through the city on the Chicago River, we entered the Illinois Waterway, which took us to the Mississippi River, which we traveled for about 200 miles. When we reached the Ohio River, we went upstream and entered the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, known as the Tenn-Tom, which took us to Mobile, Alabama. The lower Mississippi is not friendly to small boats; the river is wide and full of tankers, and the towns are far away from the river, making it hard to find fuel. So we explored the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers while waiting for the end of the hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico.
We finally arrived in the Gulf in November. Our journey then followed the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway to the western panhandle of Florida, where we waited for a calm day to cross “the Bend,” the open water of the Gulf, to the west coast of the state. The only firm dates we had on our schedule were those determined by our boat insurance company, based on hurricane risk, and the plane tickets we had purchased to fly from Florida to Vermont to visit family for Christmas. We told people, “We have no plan, and we’re sticking to it!”
After circling Florida, we crossed the 60 miles of the Gulf Stream to Bimini and the Bahamas. We spent two months in the Abacos Islands, one of the world’s top cruising destinations, using a marina with a good WiFi connection as a home base. Our days were full, but never frantic. There was time for walks in the morning (an advantage of being in a marina), time for repairing and maintaining the boat, time for learning new things (scuba diving for everyone), time to ride bikes into town for coconut bread at the bakery, time to sit and watch the sunset as the sound of people blowing conch shells filled the air. At home, I would have been checking my Palm PDA many times a day—looking at schedules and searching for information in Epocrates. When I boarded the boat, I put it in a drawer and didn’t take it out for months at a time. There was a tight community at the marina. None of the other boaters talked about what they had done before cruising, and everyone was known by their first name and their boat name. We were Sally and Jeff Adirondack and our boat was referred to as “the boat with boys.”
In March, we left the islands and started heading north, crossing the Gulf Stream again to northern Florida and heading up the Intracostal Waterway, which runs from Florida to part way up the New Jersey coast. We followed spring northward, making stops in Savannah, Charleston, the Beauforts of South and North Carolina, Norfolk, and Annapolis. We reached New York in June, anchoring behind the Statue of Liberty. Then it was up the Hudson River to Lake Champlain for a visit with the Vermont relatives and a short trip in a borrowed car to the Adirondacks for a stay at Pine Bluff, the family summer house.
Next, we headed up the Saint Lawrence Seaway to Montreal, where we celebrated Canada Day, then we traveled up the Ottawa River to the city of Ottawa, passing through an amazing eight-step lock into the heart of the city and the start of the Rideau Canal.
The Rideau Canal, now a World Heritage Site, was celebrating its 150th year. For the price of a pass to use the Canadian canals for the season and another $360 to dock, we could tie up at any of the locks, all of which were spiffed up for the occasion. At the end of the canal, we traveled west along Lake Ontario to the town of Trent. The Trent-Severn Canal was our gateway to Lake Huron—one of our favorite parts of the trip. The lake is a magical place of islands, trees, loons, and beautiful places to drop anchor and spend the night. At that time of year, the water was the perfect temperature for swimming. At Sault Ste. Marie, we reentered the United States and crossed Lake Superior. After 54 weeks, 140 locks, and 8,749 miles, we entered Pikes Bay Marina south of Bayfield. We were home.
Reentry
After a year sharing a very small space, our house felt huge and full of things that aren’t really necessary. We have been cleaning out and paring down ever since we returned.
The boys dropped back into their school lives without missing a beat and with some great material for college essays.
Without a boat to pilot, repair, and maintain, Jeff was at loose ends. He has been doing a lot of volunteer work and continues to charter our boat during the summer months. He helped a friend move his boat from Stillwater to Florida, and he is planning more trips for us after the boys are launched.
My employer took me back. I returned to a new clinic building and electronic health record. It took a bit of time to get back up to speed, but I found my clinical knowledge returned quickly. It was wonderful to be using all my skills again, working with my great partners, and catching up with my patients and their families, who had been keeping track of our travels.
Although I enjoyed hanging up my stethoscope to become the main navigator and activities director on the trip, I discovered I missed the challenge of medicine—the wonderful interactions with kids and their families and the feeling that I make a real difference in peoples’ lives. Although I no longer can sleep until I wake up and my Palm is back in my pocket and full of things I should and could do, I’m happy to be back.
Looking Back
I learned that people are the best part of a trip. You can make friends fast. The other boaters and the kind, generous people in the towns we visited will always be a part of our lives. I also learned that despite the joys of travel, it is good to have a place to come home to.
The trip was a wonderful chance to connect with my family. We had to work together and get along in a small space. If one of us was angry or upset, we allowed ourselves a “5-second pity party.” I hope the trip showed my sons that you can decide to do anything, even things other people might think are pretty radical, and make it happen. I hope it makes them braver, more willing to take chances.
Jeff and I will do more cruising, but I hope we can also try other out-of-the-loop activities such as medical volunteering. I trust that retirement, when it comes, will be a great new phase. I try not to worry as much as I used to about the future. For in the words of a friend we met during our adventure, “It will all become clear as you get closer.” MM
Sarah Colwell is a pediatrician at HealthEast’s Maplewood Clinic. To read her family’s blog about the trip, go to www.messinginboats.com; to learn more about the Great Loop, go to www.greatloop.org.