Style and Grace
The classically styled Krogen Express 52 is this couple’s ticket to ride on the Down East Circle Route and beyond.
Where did all these boats come from? That’s what Mike Miner asked himself while on a salmon fishing trip off Vancouver Island in 2005. Fishing and cruising boats zipped hither and yon. It was a stark contrast to what he would see from his home on California’s central coast, where he’d spot an occasional oceangoing tug or commercial ship, but virtually no pleasure boats.
His observation would ultimately lead him to log thousands of miles at sea over two decades. He went back to Vancouver and chartered a boat with his wife, Susie—a 32-footer that he says “looked like the Queen Mary to us”—and then chartered more boats before purchasing a few of their own, including a Selene 50. What it came time to move on to another vessel, they considered a range of builders but kept coming back to a tour they’d taken on a Krogen Express 52.
“We had seen one on the West Coast,” he says, “and were just completely intrigued. It was always kind of in the back of our minds as an option. Then we started looking at doing the Great Loop and just checked all the boxes for what we wanted.”
Their Krogen Express 52, Kokomo, has classic motoryacht lines that merge seamlessly with rugged trawler attributes, and with a superstructure that follows the graceful curve of her hull. The Miners were smitten not only with her looks, but also with her giddyap, a nice change from their time on full-displacement trawlers.
“The ability to go 16 knots was just awesome. We’ve done a few 100-mile crossings in different places, and it was very nice to be able to get there in a reasonable amount of time,” Miner says.
The search for a boat was a slog. With 27 boats built since Krogen Express principal John Tegtmeyer and his wife, Betsie, took over in 2001, few come to the brokerage market. The Miners finally found a 2007 model in Florida in good shape, with reams of maintenance records that her meticulous owner
had kept.
The boat did need to be updated, so the couple upgraded just about everything, including electronics, lighting, air conditioning, a solar array and lithium-ion battery banks.
“It’s like a brand-new boat now, it really is,” Miner says.
The couple then looked to venture into unfamiliar waters. On previous vessels, they had cruised extensively in the Pacific Northwest, so they tossed lines from the Sunshine State and headed north up the East Coast. The first surprise was how shallow their new cruising grounds were in comparison to back home.
“We decided to go outside the ICW,” Miner says, “and we’re five miles offshore and still in less than 30 feet of water. In the Pacific Northwest, it was not unusual for us to be in 1,000 feet of water. Is there any water, anywhere?”
To get a taste of the road-less-traveled experiences like they had along the Inside Passage, the Miners decided to cruise the Down East Circle Route around New England and the Canadian Maritimes. It would provide solitude with the option of stopping in major metropolitan areas such as Quebec City and Montreal.
“We wanted to have a remote experience,” Miner says. “What we liked the most about our boating experience in the Pacific Northwest was the isolation.”
Newly retired, the couple boarded Kokomo in mid-June along the Erie Canal, entering Canada at the height of summer along the Rideau Canal, where they were enthralled by the scenery and the people they met along the way. They met almost 70 lockkeepers alone, Miner says: “Every single one of them was as pleasant a human being as [we’d] run across.”
He also recalls the friendly dockmaster at the harbor near Liscombe Lodge, north of Halifax in Nova Scotia, who lent them his car for the 20-mile drive to Sherbrooke Village, a restored 19th-century village on the St. Mary’s River.
They returned to California for several weeks in August (“We still have grandkids,” Miner says) and headed back to the boat before Labor Day. After dodging “hundreds of thousands of lobster traps” around Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, the Miners completed the Down East Circle Route in Providence, R.I., in late September, having logged about 2,500 nautical miles of cruising.
With the boat safely tucked away in Providence, they’re looking forward to completing the other half of the Great Loop, perhaps over the summer. They know Kokomo will be up for it. She’s a “joy to dock and maneuver around tight spaces,” Miner says, thanks to her twin engines, thrusters and design. The only caveat may be that her looks often attract too much attention.
“Everywhere we went, people would come down and say, what is that? This is not a sales pitch. It’s just astonishing how many people walk up and admire the boat,” he says. “It’s really quite remarkable.”
