Should we consider a different boat for the Great Loop?

Let me start with the fact that we love our Beneteau 473.  It is almost everything we could want in a sail boat for the Great Lakes and even for ocean sailing (I think).  One downside for our family is that we only have 2 staterooms and our kids can't seem to figure out how to share a room with a king bed.  Long gone are the fond memories of them sharing a small V berth in our Allmond 31 wanting to hold hands with each other to fall asleep.  

Looking at our boat we decided that our two stateroom sail boat would not be ideal for our family to live on for a year and do the loop in for a number of reasons:  

1. There is not going to be much sailing on the loop route (though I would love to once we get to the Bahamas) 
2. We will have to ship the mast for the western part of the trip from Chicago to the Gulf & then again going through the Erie Canal system.
3. Teenage kids need a bit of their own space so we really want something with 3 cabins
4. Amy requested a Washer/Dryer
5. We don't currently have a great place to store a dingy other then on deck and in the way of things
6. We don't have a cockpit enclosure

Personally I would prefer to take our boat and address the above issues but unfortunately if we want to squeeze in a major family adventure together before Annabelle goes to collage we needed to do it this year as she really wants to be back for her Senior year.  While I think I could get all of the above addressed as well as a number of other projects between May and August it would be tight.  Not to mention all of the other stuff going on in our lives plus the addition of the two exchange students we have living with us this year doing all their senior activities and other stuff they would like to see/do before heading home in July.

This means that we need to buy a different boat, get it to our area of the Great Lakes, make any updates/modifications, and leave by August so hopefully we are off of Lake Michigan by the end of August or early September.  Lucky for us we live between Detroit and Sandusky so there should be lots of boats within a few hours drive to look at.  Hopefully we can look at boats around our area to help narrow down what we like and don't like and maybe even get it down to a certain model/year then expand the area to find the perfect boat!  

So what do we want?  It seems we are going to transition to the dark side and consider a power boat in an attempt to have a smaller draft and more comfort.  I would like a fly bridge and a pilot house to navigate from.  We would like diesels, a generator, and a place to store the dingy.  The kids both requested their own space which means we need something with 3 cabins.  Amy requested a washer/dryer and a big refrigerator.  Unfortunately, as we started digging though yacht world we found that to get 3 staterooms in a power boat put us into something in the 50+ foot range more often than not.  Seems when you get to that size then hight also becomes an issue as the lowest bridge we can't avoid is 19ft.. Ideally we would like something that will get under 17 or even 15.5ft bridges which would allow us to take the boat though downtown Chicago and the full length of the Erie Canal (If Canada does not open next year).  I suspect we will end up with a trawler of some sort but I'm sure we will look at a lot before we narrow it down as Amy has not been on a lot of boats and like I said before we both really like our sail boat.

We need a new adventure.. Should we do the Great Loop?

This winter I found myself pretty burned out with my job.  Maybe its a side effect of not getting out enough due to COVID?  Anyway I started day dreaming about how we might realistically do the World ARC as a family.  If you're not familiar with it the World ARC is an around the world sail boat rally done over about 18 months leaving from St Lucia.  A few years ago long before COVID we were at the Annapolis Boat Show and were invited to attend a seminar on the World ARC where we had the chance to meet a few couples that had completed the adventure. It sounds like an amazing adventure and Amy really liked that the company provided structure, guidance, and a degree of safety due to the large number of boats traveling together. When we left we both felt it was defiantly something we were interested in sometime down the road...

Well after watching a LOT of YouTube couples and families make sailing around the world look easy and fun I started really thinking about how to get my family out there before Annabelle got too old and want to leave for college in two years. After talking about it a lot as a family it became clear Max was with me and all for the adventure but Annabelle wanted nothing to do with it. Amy was somewhere in the middle with this nasty habit of looking at reality.  She kept pointing out little things like how the heck are we going to home school two teenagers that are not used to that kind of environment while traveling the world without a consistent internet connection and balancing that with good weather windows and a major lack of experience.  After more discussion we started talking about doing other things.. An RV trip across the county came up and was pretty quickly ruled out.  The possibility of taking the boat on the Great Loop came up.  Instead of two years traveling the world this trip would keep us stateside with a possible side trip to the Bahamas (if they open the boarders) and might only take a year.  Giving us some quality time together as a family and some much needed time away from work for me.

We had talked about doing the Great Loop more than 20 years ago before kids.  One weekend when I was stuck in Portland Maine for work I found a book written by a couple that had done this seemly great sounding stateside adventure.  Reading that book made it sound like it was  low risk and could be done pretty easily.  The hardest part was having both the money to afford the trip and the time required at the same time.  Needless to say I had gotten really excited about the possibilities that weekend after a few months even had Amy on board for the adventure.  Shortly after that trip we started looking at boats and eventually saw our first Allmond on Lake Norman when we lived in Charlotte.  Fun fact we almost bought that boat but could not find a dock to keep it at back then.  It only took about 10 more years before we found another one just like it that we ended up purchasing.

So now we are seriously considering taking a year as a family to travel some of our countries best waterways and possibly the Bahamas.  We spent much of February & March talking about how we might make this trip happen.  Do I try to work along the way keeping my IT job?  How do we educate the kids?  Is our current boat the right one for the purpose?  What do we do with our house, cars, and land life commitments.  I don't know the answers to any of these questions but would like to document our decision process and eventually our adventure as we go.

Still not a blogger but maybe the 3rd time is charm!

Seems blogging has not become a habit for me.  But I find myself thinking about it a lot this month and want to give it another shot as we are starting to consider our next adventure.  Will this be the end our sailing adventures?