We have a plan!

We are still in Fort Lauderdale though we have moved around a bit….. from a dock to a mooring and now back to the dock! We were lucky to get a tip that one of the 10 mooring balls south of the bridge (they are like gold dust!) was opening up very early one morning. So we slipped under the bridge at the 7:45 a.m. opening time and tied up for three days of warm, sunny weather, and visits by friends.
On Tuesday we were boarded by RCYC sailors! Bob & Carol and John & Eileen, plus John’s brother and sister-in-law, Peter and Donna had driven over from their condos in Naples. We had travelled over to the Bahamas with them last year, and this was one of several reunions we’ve had since then. Luckily the dinghy’s outboard, which had been refusing to start, was on its’ best behaviour for the visit, because 8 people stranded overnight on a 38 foot sailboat would not have been a pretty sight!
We had lunch on board in the warm sunshine and then, while ‘the boys’ became good Samaritans and helped disentangle a disabled powerboat from the bows and anchors of boats at the marina’s dock, we walked along the beach front and had coffee at our favourite coffee haunt – ‘H2O’. Bob and Carol stayed the night on board, and we went to the ‘Southport Raw Bar’ for a dinner of deliciously fresh raw oysters and roast beef!
The next day the four of us took the water taxi tour along the New River to the downtown area. We passed so many million-dollar homes and an equal number of million-dollar boats – some as big as the houses they were tethered to! We walked along the river walk and waved as ‘Madcap’, a boat from Ottawa, cruised past to the Cooley’s Landing Marina. We had all read Madcap’s blog from a previous year, and picked up a lot of useful tips from it, so it was especially good to see it.
On Thursday our solar panels were installed on the boat. This took all day and well into the evening, so we rented a car and went up the coast to Boca Raton. We also took the dinghy’s engine to be serviced!
On Friday morning we drove to Lighthouse Point to have breakfast with Fraser and Edi. It was great to catch up with all their news – their house felt like home to us as we had spent such a lovely time staying with them while we were sorting ‘Southern Vectis’ out last year. We hope to rendezvous with them in the Bahamas later on.
Since then the weather has deteriorated drastically! We’ve had 30 knot winds and heavy rain on and off since Saturday so no one is stirring from the docks. We had hoped to go back out to a mooring but no one is moving from there either! We get a discount rate at the marina as we are ‘Boat U.S.’ members, but that discount runs out after six days, and we are now in our seventh day!
We have met up with Wendy and Tony on ‘Delta G’ again. They are Port Credit Yacht Club members. Last night we got together and came up with ‘the plan’! Once the weather moderates we will sail down ‘the outside’ to Miami and spend a few days at ‘Dinner Key Marina’, as we did last year. After that we’ll wait for a ‘weather window’ (they are few and far between this year!) and cross to Bimini. From there we’ll cross the Great Bahama Bank to Chubb Cay, then on to Nassau and from there to the Exumas – the southern chain of Bahamian islands which we did not visit last year. This is our plan…..and like all plans it is subject to change!