We have managed to spend only five nights in Ft. Lauderdale this time. Last year it was twice that amount of time. Tomorrow morning, early, we are leaving for the Bahamas. The weather report sounds good and we think we are as ready as we are going to be.

It’s been a pretty good week. We have eaten at restaurants way too much. Tomorrow morning we’ll do our traditional weigh-in. Whatever we weigh now I’m sure we will weigh less when we come home. Bill calls it being on lifeboat rations. I get nervous about the food running out when we are out of the country and I just don’t feed us as much as we normally would eat. We have provisioned to the point where it would be hard to shove any more food or paper products in our refrigerator, freezer and storage shelves, although give me a few more days and I’m sure I would have. Our laundry is all clean and our fuel tanks are full. The picture above was taken from the fuel dock where we filled up this afternoon. It’s the last bridge we will see until we get to Nassau. Luckily we don’t have to have this one open for us. We are just short enough to get through (we hope!). You can also see the cruise ships on the other side of the bridge. We’ll probably see them again in Nassau too. That is our next stop. We should be there by Monday afternoon.

The last thing we do before we do an ocean crossing is to put the dinghy up on top of our butterfly hatch. It’s better not to have it hanging on the davits behind the boat if the seas are rough at all. The dinghy has been in the water way too much this month. It’s only three months old and barnacles were growing on it! When we are moving all the time the dinghy doesn’t spend too much time in the water but we spent two weeks in Vero Beach and five days here – guess that is where the barnacles came from! If we weren’t leaving tomorrow we would have gone out in the dinghy tonight to see the Christmas Boat Parade here in Ft. Lauderdale. It’s not too far from our anchorage but we couldn’t see the parade from the boat.

Our next post should be from somewhere in the Bahamas. Hopefully we’ll be able to update through our Single Side Band radio. We are really looking forward to being in the Bahamas again. We are planning on going mostly to places we have not been before.