The city of Miami from the Miami Marine Stadium

What a great sail today! We awoke thinking we were going to have to slog down the ICW opening maybe 30 bridges. Not a pretty prospect. The bridges would slow us down so that it would take 2 days to reach Miami and we would have to motor the whole way.

That all changed, however, with the early morning weather forecast. Instead of the 3 to 5 seas predicted in the previous day's forecast, the morning forecast dropped the prediction down to 2 to 4 feet. Good enough for us.
We pulled out of Riviera Beach though the Lake Worth Inlet just before 9am. The winds were directly out of the east at 15 to 20 kts. The seas were as predicted: 2 to 4 feet. As we settled down in a fast beam reach, it quickly became evident that our intended destination of Port Everglades Inlet (AKA Fort Lauderdale) was not nearly ambitious enough. We were going fast enough to make it all the way to Miami. The chart plotter estimated an arrival time at Government Cut which leads into Miami of 7pm. And that's exactly how it turned out. We were at anchor 45 minutes later.

Here's Ann's synopsis of the trip: After a hard 11 hour day of sailing we anchored across from Miami in the Miami Marine Stadium. The skyline lights are spectacular. This was at least two days of sailing. The winds were perfect and the seas not so but better than they will be tomorrow. We went in the Atlantic and saved opening maybe 30 bridges that would have been on the ICW.