Dec 13-14: Dan's Birthday and Bridges, Bridges, and more Bridges

     On Sunday we took a tour of Bob & Lynnette's Willard - we Willard owners love to compare our boats - and spent a good hour or so chatting with them.  Tony and Cathi - Ralph's in-laws - couldn't make our rendezvous; Cathi was under the weather.  Maybe another time.  We left Manatee Pocket close to noon and continued our journey South.

Jupiter Inlet light.  

     The day was hot and humid and very windy.  We traveled through the first of MANY bridges on Sunday, playing the hurry-up-and-wait game as some bridges have scheduled openings and our timing doesn't always coincide with that.  Despite our late start to setting off, we managed to make 30 miles and turned into Lake Worth for the night around five pm just as the skies opened up for a downpour.  Lake Worth is a jumping off spot for the Bahamas - for boats faster than ours - and there were many vessels anchored here waiting for their weather window.
     Today is Dan's birthday, and we celebrated with a pork roast accompanied by roasted sweet potatoes and onions, with toffee squares for dessert.
     Monday we awoke to clear skies and another warm day.  No complaining here!  I made use of all the collected rain water by doing three loads of hand laundry (which dried nicely in the wind) and then we set off to see if we could get a little farther south to await our own weather window.  There are many jumping off spots - but since we plan to get to the Exumas first, we need to leave Florida from below Miami, to make the best use of the Gulf current.  It looks like a weather window is opening at the end of the week, and it would be great if we were prepared to leave then.  If not, we'll wait for the next one.  We hoped to get to Fort Lauderdale or so today.  What we didn't really realize, were the fifteen-plus bridges we had to get through to get there.

Lake Worth

     Southern Florida is filled with bridges, almost all of them too low for a sailboat to pass under.  Many of them are one to four miles apart and they mostly operate on one of two schedules, and all of them use the same VHF frequency.  You must call the bridge tender to let them know you plan to be there for the next opening, and what ends up happening is everyone is calling a different bridge at the same time on the same radio channel.  It makes for quite a verbal traffic jam.  Often the times changed from every 30 minutes on the hour to every 30 minutes on the quarter hour from bridge to bridge, although the distance could vary from one to the next, and there were a few times when we arrived at the next bridge one or two minutes two late and had to wait thirty minutes for the next opening.  We didn't make it to Fort Lauderdale, but we did get through sixteen bridges today.  Tomorrow there are only thirteen and then we are in the beginning of the Keys.

Just one of many bridges.

Iguanas!  Many of the bridges had large iguanas hanging out below the bridgespan.

     This stretch is called 'the canyon' because the sides of the ICW are concrete and wakes reverberate back and forth.  Technically it's a low- or no-wake zone, but few of the local powerboaters observe such restrictions.  It's hard on the docks and must keep the manatees in the canals instead.  There was plenty for us to look at, however, the homes on these shores must go for millions.  We got a real kick out of the Christmas decorations, too.

Gingerbread house complete with fake snow.  

I told Dan I bet this band plays music at night.

     We turned off into a small man-made lake - Lake Santa Barbara - in Pompano Beach and anchored for the night.