Suntex Marina in Lantana - at their dock - The ICW is Closed!

The docks here are fixed but substantial and just the right height for getting on and off Fleetwing

Today was a day of surprises! We made good time going through the 15 bridges. As I've said in the past, if you can manage 7 kts through the water, then you can make all the bridges on time without having to wait. So we did our thing but the Coast Guard didn't do theirs. When we were within a few bridges of our destination for the night, we found out that the Southern Blvd Bridge was closed for the next week! Furthermore, the closure started at 7:00 am that very morning! The Coast Guard announcement was buried in the addendum to a 60 page Local Notice to Mariners issued this week. Nobody knew about the closure.

The view back towards the condos. A nice area but I wouldn't want to live here.

So now we are stuck. They have a barge in the middle of the opening being used to repair/upgrade the bridge - not really sure - and it won't be moved until 4/16 at 6:00 pm at the earliest. What a disaster for the spring ICW migration. Had the closure been better advertised, we would have left a day earlier and beat the closure but none of the online travel guides knew of the problem. In my estimation, the Coast Guard did a piss-poor job of alerting the ICW crowd. The result is a lot of interrupted schedules. Had we known as late as yesterday, we could have gone outside around the mess. Now we're faced with either waiting out the closure or back-tracking to Ft Lauderdale, waiting for weather, and head north to the Lake Worth Inlet.

Other than that, we did fine. We took a dock at Suntex which took over Loggerhead Marina and are hunkered down for a stay. At least we'll be comfortable and we needed the AC today with temps in the upper 80's. We intend to make the best of it by renting a car and seeing the area, such is cruising./