January 10, 2000 -- Ft. Lauderdale Here We Come

We will never go to Ft. Lauderdale again, at least if we can avoid it. It's like being downtown at rush hour and then tring to find a place to park. It's just not enjoyable and a lot of trouble and we really hate to be at a marina. After all you see one set of poles to tie up to and they are all the same, it's much more enjoyable to be at Anchor. The trip was somewhat unpleasant, considering that we were dealing with 15-20 knot head winds the entire time. We also decided that we would never beat into it again, if we could avoid it. When we left out of West Palm things were relatively calm. As we progressed down the coast, the waves never got very high, but the wave length was extremely short. We tried putting the sails out and short tacking, but that was shot when I was moving the stay sail from our small winch to the large one. We lost our stabilization, and the boat was rocked back and forth this was uncomfortable and we wanted to make it in early, so Mike said the hell with it, we where just going to moter in and save the time tacking back and forth would take. We arrived at the inlet for Ft Lauderdale praying that we would find someplace to anchor or tie up so we wouldn't have to go through the 17th St. Causeway bridge. Unfortunately, the one place available could only support a 6 foot draft, so we waited in line for the bridge to open. Going through bridges is a traumatic experience. I have extremely high regard for anyone who runs the intracoastal for that reason. Of course, we made it through with no problem. We motored to the Las Olas bridge where we found no anchor room, so we decided to stay at the Bahia Mar marina. After being sent from one end of the marina to the other, we finally settled in to a bulkhead slip for the night. We hooked our power, cable and phone up, sent e-mail letting everyone know we were in Ft. Lauderdale, and then went in search of food. We had not eaten since last night. We finally stopped at a little Italian place that looked like it had incredible pizza. Of course, we had steak and spaghetti. Neither was very good. We returned to the boat, uploaded the voyages section of the web site, then turned in for the evening.