Friday, January 30, 2009
Lake Boca Raton Fl; to Fort Lauderdale

Wow - 5:30 in the morning and a fishing boat (named Reaper) comes roaring up and drops anchor 7 feet away from our port window next to our bed, talking trash, playing rap (eminem) and using an extensive vocabulary of "f*#%" words and other assorted intellectually stimulating comments like that they wish they had a b-b gun so they could aim at the lights on the sailboat masts. I could only hope the rest of the day was not going to be like this... Wayne manages to sleep until 6:30 but I'm up making coffee. At sunrise I finally took my camera up top - hey there's pictures of the fog I need to get... I yelled over to them "Hey! What are you fishing for?" They need to turn down the noise to hear me... "What?" I say, "What are you fishing for?" "Oh, Tarpon - there's one out here 150 lbs!" "Wow, Are they good eating?" "No man. But they're a hell of a game fish - good sporting, you know? - You catch em and throw em back." "Oh..." I watch their antics of pretending to fish (they can't seriously think any fish in their right mind is going to come near that noise) then yell over to them again - "Hey, if you catch one can I take a picture? I've never seen a Tarpon before" "Hey sure, but we're probably going to be moving on - the actions really crappy here this morning." "Oh, okay - but if you get one, I'll take a picture" You betcha... 10 minutes later they left and peace descended once again.

After the morning hubbub we were one of the last out of the anchorage. It started to be an interesting morning - as we got to the first bridge, it got stuck in a partially open position where cars couldn't use it and boats couldn't cross it but they had it up and running again in another 5 minutes. Whew! The next bridge tender thought we said our boat name was "Cleavage" and we had to correct him (don't know how he got that from Kolibrie) and Wayne & I laughed about it. As we went under the bridge and to the other side, I waved at him (I do that - it's friendly) and he came back on the radio and said - "see, I was right the first time" I went back on the radio and laughingly thanked him and he said something about he wished he could call the boat the first name... It was fun to joke with a bridge tender.

We passed through a lot more extreme wealth along the waterway and pulled in to the Las Olas Marina at 1:00pm and snagged one of 4 moorings that were left right before the cold front came roaring through. We waited for things to die down before getting the dinghy into the water and heading over to the office to check in and get the code for the gate and access to the laundry/shower area.

The moorings here are pretty close together. As we swing in the wind and current we come pretty close to this catamaran to the point where we could probably jump from our boat to his boat when the boats swing back to back... Kind of scary. A little red sailboat came in later and grabbed another mooring on his other side and ended up moving some time during the night to a mooring further away. I don't blame them and probably would myself but the other one is pretty close to shore so I'm not sure of the depth.