Rick and Lesley Chanin had always been sailing people, cruising the Bahamas in the summers on their Lagoon 400 catamaran and their home waters around Key Largo, Florida, on their Nonsuch 36.
But after reading the book The Great Loop Experience—From Concept to Completion, the duo decided to tack. Rick knew just the boat he wanted for this exciting new chapter: Resolute, a Krogen Express 52 he’d been eyeing at the Ocean Reef Yacht Club for two years. In 2019, the Chanins sold their catamaran, purchased Resolute, and pointed its bow north for adventures along the Intracoastal Waterway and Northeast coast—something Rick never thought he’d do.
“To me, a trawler was something that signified you were too old to continue sailing and you needed something simpler,” he says. But as a fast trawler, Resolute could cruise at 16 to 18 knots, and it had beautiful lines.
“I’m hesitant every time Rick says he wants a new boat,” Lesley says. “But the Resolute was gorgeous all around. The interior is classic, really chic. It has an amazing amount of storage for a boat that size. The kitchen is set up so you can really cook in it. It’s very comfortable to be in, and it was immaculate. When we told people it was a 10-year-old boat, no one believed us.”
Rick especially appreciated Krogen’s lifetime concierge service, the boat’s full-height, walk-in engine room and the flybridge. “Being a sailor, I wanted to be outside and have wind on my face,” he says. On his return from a shakedown cruise to the Abacos in June 2019, he took the wheel on the flybridge, opened up the throttle, and shot across the open water at the boat’s top-end speed. “I had never experienced anything like that when sailing,” Rick says. “It was great.”
Lesley is passionate about history, and the Chanins’ logbook reflects it. Resolute started its 2019 Northeast sojourn at Safe Harbor Stirling in Greenport, New York, where a friend updated the marine electronics. As the couple cruised along Long Island Sound, Lesley relished stopping at historic sites—especially Mystic Harbor—along the coast of her native Connecticut as well as in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
They docked for a week at Constitution Marina in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston. “It was a short walk to the North End, where Paul Revere’s famous [Old] North Church is located and the Freedom Trail begins,” she says. They liked the location so much that they returned to the same marina after a week along Maine’s coast.
Their trip home to Florida along the Intracoastal Waterway included a stop at Shallowbag Bay Marina in Manteo, North Carolina, so they could visit nearby Roanoke Island, site of the famous “Lost Colony.” They also docked for several weeks at Georgetown, Maryland, so they could explore the Eastern Shore. “The area is rich in colonial history, with homes dating back to the early 1700s,” Lesley says.
For the 2020 cruising season, they anchored at Nantucket and Hyannis in Massachusetts and took advantage of all that Cape Cod has to offer. “I’ve never been anywhere that the colonial architecture has been so well-preserved and in such abundance,” Lesley says.
The birth of their first grandchild in June 2021 kept them closer to home for the season. The Chanins rented a slip on Marco Island, Florida. They cruised Everglades National Park and the state’s west coast, checking out such “Old Florida” spots as Everglades City for its stone crabs and its history. Their first mates were on board for the ride: Tige, their standard poodle, and Dublin, their son’s “newfypoo,” which is a cross between a Newfoundland and a poodle. “The dogs love the boat,” Lesley says. “They stand on top of the stern on dolphin patrol for hours at a time.”
For 2022, the Chanins intend to explore the Down East Loop—a concept sparked by the Great Loop book that launched this rewarding new chapter of their cruising lives. The Down East Loop can include spots as far south as the Statue of Liberty in New York and as far north as the St. Lawrence River and Nova Scotia in Canada.
“It is still on our bucket list to complete the entire Great Loop,” Rick says of the course that covers the US East Coast, Erie Canal, Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico, and that’s a bucket-list cruise for many boaters. “We’re excited to do so aboard the Resolute.”
