By James Windell
You never know what someone of a certain age and a little bit of both time and money will think of next.
Take Kirk Wiley for instance. He had a brainstorm. Which had to do with his jet ski.
“I wondered if I could jet ski to Chicago?” Wiley said the other night at a “movie premier” party at his house. “I did some test runs and figured out the fuel and I decided I would see if I could jet-ski to Chicago from South Haven.”
So he set out in late June, 2025, to ride his Kawasaki Ultra310X jet ski to Chicago.
Coming off the high of succeeding in that round trip, he had another bright idea. “I wanted to take on another jet ski challenge,” he says. “I had previously considered kayaking around the lake.”
“Why not jet-ski around Lake Michigan?” he asked himself. He discussed it with his closest neighbors and his family. “My friends Sparky (Jeremy Buckingham) and Chainsaw (Chip Hudson) were convinced I was going to meet disaster,” he remembers. “Their wives could not understand why I would do such hard things. My siblings saw this as the next in a long string of challenges that personify my desire to squeeze everything I can from this life.”
His wife Jennifer wasn’t thrilled at first. “Does everything have to be a competition?” she said. “But then she said, ‘What do you need me to do?’”
Laying out his plan to Jennifer, he said he would start in the Black River and go north on Lake Michigan to the Strait of Mackinac and then come back along Wisconsin, past Chicago and end up back in the Black River. Jennifer, who it is rumored is being considered for sainthood, agreed to drive along Lake Michigan and meet at various marinas on his route to help him fuel up, find food, and have a place to stay each night of the expected 3-day trip.
Although he recalls that when he talked about the Chicago crossing, he felt like it was more of a vanity project, in designing the big blue loop trip, he wanted to balance his adventurous spirit with his service spirit. He decided to make the trip and the video as a way of raising funds for Liteta, a rural settlement located in Chibombo District, Central Province of Zambia.
“Liteta has a growing population of over 10,000 people but the community faces chronic water shortages, especially during the dry season,” Wiley says. “Most families rely on shallow, hand-dug wells and seasonal streams, which often dry up or become contaminated, leading to widespread cases of waterborne illnesses.”
Wiley is planning to donate more than $20,000 he and Jennifer have raised to not only improve the water supply in Liteta, but to help the community develop a safe space where community members can gather for spiritual formation, educational workshops, youth activities, or skills training.
Not only did Wiley complete the 750-mile trip around Lake Michigan, but he made a video of his athletic endeavor. Called “Big Blue Loop,” the almost 14-minute video was given its world premier at the party on December 2. The record of his Lake Michigan adventure, which he went on from September 15 to 17, 2025, was, he said before the movie was viewed by friends and neighbors for the first time, was not conceived to make him a hero for his feat.
“This video is tongue-in-cheek,” Wiley said. “There are things in here where humor is pointed straight at me and you shouldn’t hesitate to laugh.”
As the video indicates, there were some dangers involved as Lake Michigan currents can be treacherous and never having sailed (or jet-skied) through the waters around the big lake he was not always sure where rocks were hiding. As he disembarks from his Kawasaki on Saturday, September 17, back in the Black River, the video clearly shows a fatigued man with a sun-burned face who looks like he could collapse at any moment.
“Big Blue Loop” is available on YouTube and can be found at ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RITqYrmIM0A
For information about donating to the Zambia project, go to Kirk’s GoFundMe link at https://gofund.me/a14765928
