AGLCA publishes its wake-crossing numbers every year. Nobody has put five years side by side — so we did, and two things show up that a single year hides.
Mainship has been the most-finished make five years running. And Carver is the only make that has risen every year since 2022 — 9, 10, 17, 19, 20.
Neither of those is visible if you only read one year's page, which is how this data is usually published.
Number of wake crossings reported to AGLCA.
| Make | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mainship | 13 | 20 | 32 | 31 | 29 |
| Carver | 9 | 10 | 17 | 19 | 20 |
| Grand Banks | 5 | 11 | 16 | 13 | 13 |
| Sea Ray | 4 | 15 | 10 | 11 | 11 |
| Ranger Tug | 8 | 13 | 10 | 13 | 6 |
| Bayliner | 7 | 7 | — | 6 | 7 |
| Meridian | — | 7 | 9 | 9 | — |
| Kadey Krogen | — | 9 | 6 | — | 7 |
| Nordic Tug | 8 | — | 8 | — | 6 |
| Beneteau | — | — | 6 | 8 | 7 |
| Cruisers Yachts | — | — | 7 | 6 | 8 |
| Monk | — | 6 | 8 | — | 6 |
| Silverton | — | — | 6 | 11 | — |
| DeFever | — | 7 | 6 | — | — |
A dash does not mean zero. AGLCA publishes only the top ten or so each year, so a dash means the make fell below the cut — not that no one finished on one.
2025 figures, and what the five years behind them can and can't tell you.
Don't read those five numbers as a trend. Reported crossings run 130, 227, 249, 270, 272 — but each year has an event attached.
2021 was still a pandemic year for the Loop. The US–Canada border was shut to tourism for most of the season, reopening in August with a complicated qualification process. Boats that went committed to the western Erie route without Canada, and Canadians couldn't go at all.
2022 was the first normal season — and it carried the people who had delayed, on top of a wider rise in interest in boating that came with the pandemic. Two causes, not one. 2023 was hit by a major closure on the Illinois River locks, which pushed anyone transiting into a late-autumn run south; some simply waited a year.
Which leaves 2024 and 2025 as the first two comparable years, and they agree with each other. That looks less like growth stalling than like a baseline.
We had this wrong. The correction came from a Gold Looper who read this page and wrote in — and AGLCA gave the same explanation independently. This page asks people to tell us when we've misread something. Someone did, within a day, and he was right.
A 40-footer is the normal Loop boat, and has been for five years. The average has sat between 40.3' and 41.3' every year, and the 40–49' band is the largest segment — 53% of the 2025 fleet. Only about one boat in eight is 50 feet or more, so if you're looking at something bigger you're outside what most people finish on.
⭐ Experienced advice points lower than the data does, and that gap is worth sitting with. Loopers who have done it repeatedly tend to put the sweet spot for a couple at 28 to 36 feet — one put it as after 36' it gets "much more expensive and difficult to handle." The fleet that actually finishes averages 41.3'.
Both are true, and they're optimizing for different things. The advice is about running cost and handling a boat shorthanded. The buyers are about living aboard for a year or two. Which one applies to you depends on how long you plan to stay aboard and how much of the boat you'll be handling alone — and that's a question about you, not about the boat.
653 days is elapsed time, not time aboard. It counts from departure to wake crossing, which for many people includes laying the boat up for a season or going home for months. Done continuously, the Loop is about a year. That average is telling you something else: most people don't run it straight through.
Asked what the best thing was that happened because they had to stop, three Loopers described waits of four, nine and twelve days — for weather, for a window to cross the Gulf, and for a haul-out slot. All three described the wait as a highlight rather than a delay. That is the shape behind the average: the Loop takes as long as it does partly because the good parts are often the unplanned ones.
⭐ One of those waits was for a haul-out slot, not weather — and that is worth separating out, because it is the one you can't wait out by watching a forecast. If a boat needs work underway, the wait for a yard can cost more than the work. Haul-out lead time appears in no cost figure anyone publishes, including ours.
What these numbers are, and what they aren't.
These are wake crossings reported to AGLCA by its own members. A boat only appears here if the crew joined the association and told them they'd finished. Anyone who does the Loop outside AGLCA is invisible in this data — so treat the totals as a floor, not a count.
That also means the flattening in 2025 might be about the association rather than the route. If membership leveled off, reported crossings would level off too, even if more boats than ever were finishing. We don't have membership figures, so we can't tell you which it is — and neither can anyone else quoting these numbers.
The part that matters most if you're shopping.
Popularity is not suitability. Mainship tops this list because a lot of affordable, well sized Mainships exist — not because it's the right boat for you. Plenty of makes near the bottom are excellent, and some aren't on the list at all because few were built.
And these are makes, not models — which is where the real decision lives. A Mainship 34 MK1 with the 160 hp engine is an eight-knot boat. A later 34 with 200 hp or more will do eleven, and eleven knots is what settles the wallow those hulls get in a following sea. Same make, same list, different boat.
And a make can mean different boats in different decades. Grand Banks is on this list, but that badge has covered very different hulls over the years — the classic trawler that built the name and the faster, more modern boats sold under it now are not the same purchase. A row tells you a badge finished the Loop. It doesn't tell you which boat wore it.
That gap — between knowing a make is popular and knowing whether a specific boat will suit you — is the whole reason this site exists.
Every figure above is AGLCA's own, published on their site as annual completion stats for 2021 through 2025 — public, and linked so you can check us. What we added is putting five years in one table and asking what the totals do and don't tell you. We haven't audited them, and we'd have no standing to.
If we've read something wrong here, tell us and we'll fix it — support@caniloop.net.