About

We are Mark and Denise Gillespie from Winter Park, FL aboard the motor vessel “Island Office”.

We are Gold Loopers who completed a 6000+ nautical mile adventure known as America’s Great Loop.  From April 13, 2015 until April 20, 2016 we cruised many of the North American Waterways. Up the east coast we traveled the Atlantic Intra Coastal Waterway (ICW), The Chesapeake Bay, the Hudson River, and the Erie & Oswego Canals  before crossing Lake Ontario into Canada.  From Trenton, Ontario, we entered the Trent-Severn Waterway (TSW) and completed 44 locks into the Georgian Bay.  There we enjoyed the beauty of many anchorages and spectacular places before exploring a few communities in the North Channel.

After 6 weeks in Canada we headed back to the USA by crossing Lake Huron and the Mackinac Straits into Lake Michigan (Michigan side), and down the Western Rivers including the: Chicago, Illinois, Mississippi, Ohio, Cumberland , Tennessee, Tenn-Tom Bigbee until we reached Mobile, AL.  From there we ventured through the Gulf Coast ICW (GICW), a Gulf of Mexico crossing from Carrabelle, FL to Dunedin, FL, down the West Coast of Florida and through the FL Keys to Miami.  It took us another few weeks to slowly make our way north up the East Coast of FL to our home port in Merritt Island as we did not want our adventure to end.  It was a thrill of a lifetime and has us now hooked on cruising.

We own a management consulting firm for manufacturers and distribution companies (The Denmark Group, Inc.) and since we are not retired we worked along the way; thus our boat’s name.

Our cruising vessel of choice (Island Office) is a Back Cove 37 that is manufactured in Rockland, Maine. She is a downeast-type boat with classic lines and lots of nice features.  You can learn more about these fine boats at Back Cove Yachts.