Choosing the Right Boat

Once we had decided that we would actually attempt to do this trip, we quickly realized that the wonderful 22' Bayliner that we had been toodling around Chesapeake Bay in for a couple of years, was not going to be appropriate for the Loop. We were going to need more than "a camper that floats", as we had termed our Bayliner so often. We read everything we could get our hands on related to the Loop and we joined the America's Great Loop Cruisers Association. Over the next year or two we looked at hundreds of boats, both physically and in pictures, to get an idea of what style and size boat we could be comfortable in for an extended period of time. We spoke with a wonderful boat broker on Kent Island named Darlene and she was our main source of information. Every so often we would go across the bridge and pick her brain and look at more boats. We needed to decide what type of engines we should run and, in order to conserve fuel during the trip, we felt that we would want to run a boat with diesel engine(s). Since Flint is our engineer/captain, he weighed the benefits of one engine or two and listened to other captains about their preference. We were finally comfortable with the Sundeck Trawler style of boat and we narrowed our search to include only that type. The decision about one or two engines was made for us when we found just the right boat in November of 2006. It was a 40 foot 1987 Present Flybridge Sundeck trawler with twin Volvos in Tom's River, NJ. As soon as we boarded her, we knew this was going to be our new home. After a couple of negotiations, she became ours the first week in December. We made many trips to New Jersey that winter, getting her ready to become our new home.