America's Great Loop, Aussie Style
6000 miles in 5 months aboard a borrowed 26' boat on America's inland waterways
Australian author Derrick Baan fulfills a thirty-year dream by completing America's Great Loop in a borrowed 26-foot boat, telling the story through 500 color photographs and an honest, good-humored account of the journey.
Derrick Baan first read about the Great Loop in a boating magazine before he was thirty. For the next three decades he collected books and charts, waiting for the moment he could actually go. When that moment finally came, he borrowed a 26-foot boat and set off to cover 6,000 miles of North American inland waterways — and this book is what came of it.
What makes this one stand out is the perspective. Baan is Australian, which gives him the outsider’s eye that long-time Americans sometimes lose: the strangeness of the locks, the scale of the Great Lakes, the particular character of small river towns. He notices things. The book is also unusually visual, with over 500 color photographs woven through the narrative, so it reads as much like a travel album as a traditional memoir.
If you are in the planning stages and want to know what the Loop actually looks and feels like from the water — not the polished version, but the real one aboard a modest borrowed boat — this is a good one to have on hand. It covers the full Loop route and will feel familiar to anyone who has stared at those same charts for years before finally going.
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