Marathon to Fort Lauderdale

 2/27/2022

Morning of departure - storm clouds have 
not left us yet!

Marathon to Fort Lauderdale

Enjoying the sunset from the dock

first time I have seen this name since
 our boat that Hugh named when the kids were very young

We enjoyed a lovely dinner with our new friends, Karen and Ed Munson, on their boat Oasis, which is the exact same boat as ours.  We are just a few hull numbers older.  It is always interesting to compare boat stories, and because they are so friendly and talk to so many people, they have a lot of fun stories.  Of course, they are basically our age so we all have a lot in common.

The manatee sighting yesterday was pretty cool, it was just a foot away, I am sure we could have touched him/her.  We felt badly for it as it had lots of fishing line wrapped around one if it's fins.  The man giving the manatee water was considering calling a manatee rescue to see if they would come and cut off the line.  We thought if we attempted that, it would not go well.

Dinner on Oasis with the Munson's

We are on our way to Fort Lauderdale this morning, weather predictions has the wind dying down during the day so since this is an all ocean day, we are hoping for calmer seas than we had yesterday.  On the way down we during this leg of the trip we were really able to make good time and it took us 5.5 hours.  I don't anticipate that today, but it sure would be nice!

Our last Keys sunset for the trip!

We will be staying at Bahia Mar marina for the night but have to do more planning and trip reservations when we figure out where we are able to go.

So here we sit at 6:00 PM, at the slip in Fort Lauderdale.  Sandy has washed the boat as every single part of it was saturated with salt, you could actually see the granules!  The first three hours of the trip were rough, not nice at all.  The seas did not calm down until we were abreast of Key Largo.  It was a very long trip, from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM on the water is very fatiguing, especially for the Captain, but also for the crew and Parker.  We never like to travel in Florida, especially South Florida on a weekend, it is so crazy here.  It seems like there are actually traffic jams, boats of all sizes everywhere, going in every single direction, turning around in the middle of the channel, you name it, totally crazy and not our type of boating at all.  When we finally were approaching the Fort Lauderdale inlet, one cruise ship had already exited, but two more were in progress.  Even with these massive boats leaving, boats were weaving and passing, and in general, behaving badly!

One last challenge to our trip today, after a long
day we encountered in the inlet a parade of four cruise ships leaving port
lastly a mile of crazy weekend traffic in ICW before Bahia Mar

We are doing some simple cooking on the boat tonight, we don't have the energy to do much else! Tomorrow we go to Old Port Cove in West Palm Beach.  Tomorrow morning we will decide if we go outside to avoid all the darn bridge openings.  The weather will determine that for us.

This marina caters to super yachts
The huge vessel on the left is Amaryllis
owned by a Russian Oligarch