Adopting the Great Loop mindset
When I asked Malinda and Keith Martin when a good time for an interview would be, Malinda wrote back, “We are having drinks on the back deck, so now would be fine.” I was having drinks on my front porch, and I knew already the conversation would be more than fine. The Martins are from Huntsville, Alabama, and started down the Tennessee River in their 1987 forty-three-foot Hatteras motor yacht — the Sea Cottage — last December on their quest to become “Loopers.” In late May, when we spoke, they were anchored in North Carolina. A person earns the title of “Looper” when he completes the Great Loop, which America’s Great Loop Cruisers’ Association (AGLCA) explains is “a circumnavigation of the eastern US and part of Canada.
