He left Saturday morning from La Crosse’s Riverside Park, about to embark on a 7,000-mile journey — on a jet ski.

It’s called “The Great Loop” — a 6,000-mile continuous waterway circumnavigating the eastern U.S. and eastern Canada — and La Crosse’s Raj Ramnarace is going to spend the next two months navigating it.

Again, on a jet ski.

Launching from Riverside into the Mississippi River, Ramnarace’s route takes him south to Alton, Ill., and down toward the Gulf of Mexico. From there, he’ll wrap around Florida, head up the East Coast to New York City, travel through the Hudson River and Erie Canal, cross the Great Lakes, and head back down the Illinois River to complete the circle.

“There are like 80 different locks and dams I have to get through, so barge traffic and stuff like that will slow you down,” Ramnarace said Saturday from Riverside Park of how long it’ll take him. “Weather, you know it’s kind of coming into hurricane season so I’m hoping to avoid those.”

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Ramnarace got the idea after seeing another Wisconsin local, Jacob Barnowski, who completed the route on a $300 jet ski.

“I always wanted to do something sort of adventurous like that and I did some sailing and Lake Superior, but I thought I really wanted to do something big,” Ramnarace said.

As for Ramnarace’s jet ski, it took a bit to get it ready. It took about 100 hours of prep, including installing a bilge pump.

“As long as the machine’s healthy and I’m healthy, the machine’s doing all the work,” Ramnarace said. “I’m just hanging on.”

As for sleeping arrangements along the stretch, Ramnarace plans to keep it simple.

“I’ll be doing a lot of camping on sandbars on the way down,” he said. “Hopefully hit some marinas, get a shower.”