We end up spending three nights in Fort Lauderdale waiting out a fairly vigorous front. While we are secure on the dock face as shown in the picture from the previous blog post, it is very windy. Raucous because we are right in front of a very popular restaurant/night spot and it is a weeknd. Also, all sorts of traffic plies this New River, all hours of the day and night and, of course they pass very close by us. Finally the regular spewing of run off from the other side adds to this cacophony.

There are several large trees on the banks just by us and soon our boat is riddled with thousands of tiny leaves. Of course we track them into the cabin and our normally Bristol boat now looks quite shoddy. Also these little wet leaves are leaving brown stains on anything they touch so it'll be some work to get rid of it.

Nonetheless we make the best of it and roam around Fort Lauderdale. It is very upscale and if you go by the cars people drive, you would easily see two European luxury/sport cars for every American sedan.

We meet an interesting cruising couple on a Hunter 44 who we help take their lines as they try to negotiate the same docking procedure we had done the day before. Margaret and Ben to show their gratitude and in keeping with the normal cruisers' congeniality, have us over for happy hour.

We take a bus to the beach then Roger and I take a transfer to the West Marine store. This helps put in another day.

The weather promises improvement so we hope to leave on Monday to make Miami. There is some timing involved; we want to leave on a rising tide so we can manoeuver better down the New River but we cannot leave before 9:00 a.m. as this is the first opening of the bridge just east of us. There is another opening (bascule) bridge which we'd hope to make at 9:30 (if we're lucky), then out into the Atlantic and down the coast to Miami.

We will be glad to leave Fort Lauderdale. Coming up the New River was an adventure but we doubt we'd do this again. We'd likely anchor off the ICW.