Ft Lauderdale - at a mooring

Welcome to Ft Lauderdale - appropriate welcome

We awoke this morning to an outside temperature of 45 with a cool wind out of the north, that's cold for Florida! I had to untie a lot of lines I put in place to protect us from 30 kt winds (peak gust was 37) during the northern fronts that came rolling down. Finally I got everything balanced so we could thread the needle between the two aft pilings and we were off - but still cold. We have a little ceramic heater that puts out a lot of BTU's so we placed that in the cockpit and ran it off the Prosine (inverter) powered by the engine charger. That warmed up the cockpit. We've used the ceramic heater in the past to defog the plastic window, it works very well at that.

Distinct lack of bikinis on the beach! 

So we passed through the usual 15 bridges and once we got in sync with the timed bridges, we never had to wait. Even though there's many more bridges, it's an easier (and quicker) run through these 15 than the fewer in North Carolina that only open once an hour.

We went in to do a wash and found the boaters' meeting room filled with groups planning on crossing over to the Bahamas on Monday. We like Monday since the prediction is for winds less than 10 kts all day, perfect for making the trip to Caesar's Creek. There was a lot of discussion going on relative to the pros and cons of a crossing on Monday. Perhaps the marginally better weather will thin out Marathon too. We heard today that the waiting list for a mooring is now up to 50 boats! The place must be packed since they have to anchor out to wait for a mooring. Last year, Marathon upped the price for anchoring (if you wanted to use their dinghy dock and other facilities) to the same as for a mooring! So I guess Marathon doesn't really care if you anchor and put yourself on the waiting list, they get the same revenue either way.

We'll leave late morning on Monday since we can't enter Caesar's Creek until after low tide anyway, around 5:00 pm. From there we plan on making it to Marathon and then it's a short hop to Key West and our dock for two months.