There is a published figure, and there is what it measures. They are not the same question, and the gap between them is where your plan lives.
AGLCA publishes an average completion time of 653 days — a little under two years. That figure is elapsed time: the day you left to the day you crossed your own wake.
It is not time aboard, and it is not how long the route takes.
Elapsed time counts everything that happened in between — the weather days, the month you stayed somewhere because you liked it, the season the boat spent on the hard, the wait for a part. All of that is inside the average, and none of it is traveling.
Which is why the figure cannot answer the question people ask it. Two boats that took the same elapsed time can have spent wildly different amounts of it moving, and the average has no way to tell them apart. It is a real number measuring a real thing — just not the thing you need when you are working out whether you can go.
The same page publishes a second number that almost nobody quotes: the median is 376 days. Half of the boats that finished did it in around a year — not two.
The gap between those two numbers is the finding. An average of 653 against a median of 376 means the average is being dragged upward by a long tail: the people who stopped for a season, laid the boat up, went home for a year, came back. There is no fleet of boats all taking 653 days. There is a large group finishing in about a year and a smaller group taking several — and the average sits in the gap between them, describing neither.
Which is the same point as everything above, now with a number attached: elapsed time is mostly stopping, and the average is mostly measuring the people who stopped longest. AGLCA's 2025 completion statistics — 272 boats crossed their wake.
⚠️ So treat it as a bound, not a plan. It tells you what people's whole trips have spanned, start to finish — not how many days you will be underway.
AGLCA's own guidance points at it. Their published FAQ says most Loopers cover about fifty miles on the days they move — and that most Loopers cruise one day in three.
That ratio is the whole answer. Two-thirds of a Loop is spent not moving.
At fifty miles a day, a six-thousand-mile Loop is roughly 120 days of travel. One publicly logged trip came in higher: Maria Langer posted 377 days on the Loop, 193 of them cruise days, 6,498 miles — an average of 33.7 miles on each day underway. Another, Kate Carney, finished in 8 months and 8 days across 6,202 miles and 144 stops.
So call it four to six months of actually moving, spread across whatever elapsed time you choose. And the gap between 120 days and 193 is not the route — it is how far you run in a day.
⚠️ Nobody publishes that figure directly. AGLCA publishes a rule of thumb and a handful of Loopers publish their own logs — the travel-day number is something you derive from those, not something anyone hands you. Which is why the arithmetic is above rather than the conclusion on its own.
AGLCA publishes the spread plainly: the Loop has been done in as little as 12 days and in as much as 12 years, and traditionally people spend about a year on the route.
Plenty of people run the Loop in pieces — go for a few weeks, park the boat, come back. The published average has no way to show you that, because a boat sitting between blocks looks identical to a boat going slowly.
And for that way of doing it, your calendar is not the binding constraint. The season is.
AGLCA puts the shape of the year plainly: be on the northern part of the Loop in the warm summer months, the inland rivers in the fall, winter in Florida, and follow the warm weather back up the eastern side in spring.
The northern half — the Erie, the Trent-Severn, the Canadian canals, the top of the Great Lakes — has roughly a five-month window. Miss it and the boat waits where it sits until next year. The southern half is the opposite: the Gulf and Florida are where you want to be in winter.
So the question is not how many trips you can take. It is how many of them land inside the season for wherever the boat currently is — and that is what decides whether a segmented Loop takes two years or five.
The boat sits, and sitting is a bill. Transient dockage is charged by the foot per night; monthly rates are far cheaper but have to be arranged ahead, at a place you will actually be. Budget for storing a boat you are not on, for most of every month.
Every trip ends somewhere new. You fly into one airport and out of a different one, several hundred miles further along, over and over. This — not the miles — is what makes or breaks a segmented Loop. Plan your blocks around places where you can leave a boat safely and reach an airport, and the route will bend to fit.
A boat that sits is a different maintenance proposition from a boat that runs. Impellers, hoses, fuel, batteries, and everything else that dislikes being still. ⚠️ The usual advice that low hours are good news runs backwards here — you are deliberately creating a boat that sits. That's the engine-hours page.
An illustration of the method, not a schedule. Every date depends on the year, the water and the boat.
Boats home-ported on the Tennessee River — Pickwick Lake, say — start with an advantage that is easy to miss. You are already on the Loop rather than off it. Most people begin with a delivery leg just to reach the circle. From Pickwick the Tennessee runs west to the Ohio, and the Tenn-Tom runs south from the same water toward Mobile Bay. You can set off in either direction without moving the boat first, and you pass close to home at both ends of the trip. Whether a boat can reach the Loop at all is its own question.
Running it counter-clockwise, the blocks fall roughly like this:
| When | Roughly where | Why then |
|---|---|---|
| Fall | Tenn-Tom south toward Mobile Bay | Get south before winter |
| Winter | Gulf coast and Florida | The one season the south is the right place to be |
| Spring | North up the east coast | Ahead of the heat, arriving as the canals open |
| Summer | Erie or the Canadian canals, then the Great Lakes | The only window there is. Everything else bends around this row |
| Fall | Chicago, then down the Illinois and Mississippi | Locks and river levels set the pace |
| Winter | Ohio and Tennessee rivers, home | Crossing your own wake where you started |
Two years of short blocks, sketched. Its one hard constraint is the summer row — everything else can slip a season, and that cannot.
AGLCA's published FAQ and completion statistics, plus two Loopers who publish their own trip logs — Maria Langer's day-by-day numbers and Kate Carney's account of finishing. We haven't done the Loop. The mileage, the one-in-three ratio and the seasonal shape are AGLCA's; the logged days are theirs; the arithmetic joining them is ours, and it is arithmetic rather than a forecast.
If we've got something wrong, tell us and we'll fix it — support@caniloop.net. A correction from someone who has actually run it is worth more than anything we can write.