West Palm Beach - at anchor

Typical "winter house" near Ft Lauderdale

We left Ft Lauderdale at 8:15 and headed north. We knew we weren't as fast as usual due to the buildup on the hull from Key West that I foolishly didn't get scraped off. As I've said in the past, you can make all the bridges without delays if you can do 7 kts but that speed includes delays caused by adverse tides so you really have to be able to reach 8 kts to counter the effects of adverse current. Well, for the most part that was beyond us but we did pretty well until we reached Lake Avenue Bridge which normally has two openings an hour at 1/4 and 3/4 past the hour. However, due to construction on another  bridge, they were only opening on top of the hour. So we saw it open ahead of time and we went all out with the rpms but the bridge operator closed the bridge ahead of us when we were within 1 minute of making it through. It turned out that traffic was backed up for miles and the bridge had been open for 10 minutes already due to a barge coming through. Oh well, we circled for 45 minutes as we waited for the 3:00 opening, such is cruising on the ICW.

Example two

We're at an anchorage that's between two bridges and there're free dinghy docks available for Hoolie relief here at West Palm Beach. The holding is excellent and it appears calm so we'll probably be back in the fall. We had intended stopping to visit Joe Mastri but he wasn't feeling so well so we continued northward. Along the way we passed by fabulous houses typical of the ICW north of Ft Lauderdale, all mini-mansions. Fun to look at but I wouldn't want one, the view never changes (like it does off the back of our boat).

We're a sucker for sunsets

We plan on anchoring at Hobe Sound on Wednesday, a short hop north of here, passing by Tiger Woods house along the way. It will be a short day which is fine with us after today.