We didn’t end up going outside to Ft. Lauderdale today. The weather report didn’t seem good so we checked with an expert before trying the ocean route. This year, because we are hopefully going further than just the Bahamas, we purchased a subscription to Chris Parker’s weather reporting and routing. That means that in the morning when Chris, who I call “the God of Bahamian Weather” does his weather report on the single side band radio, we are allowed to ask specific questions about the routes we are planning to take. This morning, since we are still in the US, Bill posed his question on the web instead of using the SSB radio. Chris said not to go, so we didn’t. We spent the day waiting for bridges on the ICW instead. If we had gone outside we would be in Ft. Lauderdale now, instead we are only in Boca Raton. One of the cool things we saw was this ship in the picture above. Those are sailboats on its deck. That is the easy way to take your boat someplace!

We were with another sailboat through most of the twelve bridges we went through today. Even though we never met them before by the time we both got to Boca Raton we were good friends. We invited them over for drinks. We had a good time chatting about our sailing experiences and complaining about the bridges.

All was well until after dinner when the boat started feeling kind of weird. Whoops! The boat had turned around and we were now hitting the bottom. The water is too shallow now that the tide has gone down! No problem –it’s a soft sandy bottom and our boat can handle it. So far it hasn’t hit too badly but we need to make sure we leave at high tide which is at daybreak tomorrow. Guess we will get to Ft. Lauderdale sooner than we expected.