As a boy, Bryan Megginson used to sit on the dock of his grandparents’ home on Fowl River and imagine that he could reach anywhere in the world by boat, right from that spot. In October 2025, at age 64, he proved himself right — crossing his own wake at the mouth of Fowl River after a 6,214-mile voyage around the eastern half of the continent.
Bryan and his wife Carol completed America’s Great Loop in eight months and four days, a circumnavigation of the eastern United States and part of Canada via mostly protected inland waterways. Only a few hundred boats complete the trip in any given year — 270 boats reported wake crossings in 2024 — and the America’s Great Loop Cruisers’ Association keeps an adage its members know well: more people climb Mount Everest than complete the Great Loop.
What the Great Loop is
The route, roughly 6,000 miles for most who attempt it, follows the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway and the Chesapeake Bay north, passes through the New York canals, crosses the Great Lakes, and returns south down the inland rivers to the Gulf Coast. Boaters typically cover it in trawlers and cruising boats in the 40-foot range — the average completed Loop boat measures about 41 feet — traveling through more than 100 locks along the way.
For Bryan, a Mobile-area native, the route was drawn in his imagination long before he knew it had a name. In high school he was a self-described river rat, exploring the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and studying maps. “I would look at maps and atlases and see that you could draw a blue line from Mobile to Chicago,” he says. “When the internet came along, and Google Earth, I could see all the possibilities.” In the early 2000s he heard about someone who had actually done the trip from Mobile to Michigan and back. “I’d never heard the term ‘Great Loop’ and felt like someone had stolen my idea.”
How a pandemic creates a plan
The plan crystallized when COVID arrived and Carol’s job moved home. Bryan, who had spent his career selling surgical medical devices, was ready for a change; with Carol able to work from anywhere, the voyage became possible. When retirement talk came up with his business partner of more than 25 years, Bryan revealed the plan: the last day of 2024 would be his final day with the team.
That summer, the couple searched for the right vessel and found it close to home — a 1984 40-foot Ocean Alexander Europa trawler, a former Loop veteran, practical and fuel-efficient. The critical requirement was not nautical. “Most important,” Bryan says, “was equipping the boat, aptly named Shine On, so Carol could continue working while on the voyage. This trip doesn’t happen if Carol can’t work successfully from the boat.”
The solution was modern: a Starlink satellite system connected to a solar-charged lithium battery bank, with two layers of redundancy. A seasoned Dauphin Island mechanic whose boat shared Shine On’s diesel engines visited three times to walk Bryan through the engines. After a shakedown weekend at Petit Bois Island off the Mississippi coast, they were ready.
South first, then the long way home
From the mouth of Fowl River into Mobile Bay, the Loop properly begins at the Intracoastal Waterway at Bon Secour. Heading east, boaters face the first big routing decision near Apalachicola: hop along the Gulf coast around Florida’s Big Bend, inlet to inlet, or take an open-water crossing straight across the Gulf to Tarpon Springs. The Megginsons chose the crossing — and caught it perfectly. “The waters were flat, the sun was shining, and the dolphins swam alongside the boat the whole day,” Carol says. “As day turned to night, a full moon illuminated the calm seas all the way to Tarpon Springs.”
Florida’s west coast led to the Keys — Key West, Islamorada, Key Largo, Carol’s first visit — and then north up the Atlantic Intracoastal, with Carol running her office from the salon and Bryan sightseeing from the fly bridge. “I didn’t feel the need to see every bird, ripple, or leaf that fell,” Carol says, “but Bryan was loving the sightseeing the whole time. I never knew where we were each day, but I did know what day it was. Bryan was just the opposite.”
Highlights accumulated: a night space launch from the Kennedy Space Center seen from the water, mooring in St. Augustine and Annapolis, and — the biggest thrill — coming up the Hudson River into New York Harbor. “Seeing the Statue of Liberty in person and from our own boat,” Bryan says. “It was too awesome for words. I felt like I had really accomplished something grand.”
New York, Canada and Michigan
From New York they threaded the Erie Canal, crossed Lake Ontario and ran up the St. Lawrence River to Clayton and the Thousand Islands, sharing the river with freighters. In Canada came the Trent-Severn Waterway — where the Big Chute marine railway literally carries boats up and over land — and weeks in Georgian Bay and the North Channel. “Baie Fine, Ontario, was like entering fjords in Norway, with float planes and boats providing the only access in some areas,” Carol says. The couple ate freshly caught fried walleye at Henry’s Restaurant and dropped anchor at spots they describe as indescribably beautiful.
Michigan surprised them most. “Totally unexpected, with Bahamas-blue water and high sand dunes,” Carol says of the coastal towns — Petoskey, Muskegon, Saugatuck — and Mackinac Island on the way south toward Chicago.
Life at 7 knots
Daily life aboard settled into a rhythm. Two-thirds of their nights were spent at anchor or on a mooring rather than docked at marinas. Mornings meant coffee wherever they were; after pulling up anchor, Carol went to her office in the salon and Bryan to the fly bridge, and after six or seven hours they would square the boat away and watch the sunset with a bottle of wine.
The logistics of living aboard became second nature — always topping off water tanks in port, constantly hunting for good coffee beans, learning the daily engine-room checks. Carol became an accomplished deckhand, handling dock lines and the anchor, and became fluent in locks, of which the route served up more than 110. The couple ran aground a couple of times, as most Loopers do, and learned to respect the two-tides-a-day rhythm of the East Coast. Neither caught a cold the entire voyage.
The Great Loopers’ club
One small item marked them as members of a tiny fraternity: the burgee issued by the AGLCA, flown to identify a boat traveling the Loop. “If you have the burgee flying, you are guaranteed that other Loopers you encounter will either be cordial or become your best friends,” Bryan says.
The connections can be uncanny. Early in the voyage, they crossed paths in Belhaven, North Carolina, with a Texas couple also doing the Loop — who asked, upon learning where the Megginsons were from, “Do you know Zeb and Linda from Fairhope?” They did.
Many Loopers interrupt the voyage to travel home; the Megginsons committed to a continuous voyage, promising family they would not come home except in an emergency. Their only real worry was their mothers, both in Mobile. As it happened, Carol’s mother flew to Chicago to celebrate Carol’s birthday while they were docked there — “What a gift for all of us,” they say.
Homeward
On Sept. 16, Bryan celebrated his 64th birthday on the water. On Oct. 31, 2025, Shine On crossed its wake at the entrance to Fowl River, closing the circle more than eight months after it opened.
The AGLCA’s own numbers put the achievement in context: of the boats that finish, most take far longer than eight months to do it — the average span from start to completion is more than a year and a half, and only a fraction of American boaters ever attempt the route at all. For the Megginsons, the summary is simple. They quarreled exactly zero times in eight months aboard a 40-foot boat, fulfilled a dream sketched from a dock on Fowl River decades earlier, and came home to figure out what comes next.
“We feel fortunate to have completed this trip mostly unscathed,” Bryan says. “As far as being in a box together for eight months, that was the easy part.”