Almost Like Florida

Well, we are still on a mooring in Fort Lauderdale, but the weather is no longer cold. It’s gone from ridiculously cold to cool to warm and rainy and windy. Kind of like normal Florida. But the winds are still clocking around like a whirling dervish, still not yielding any weather window longer than 1/2 day. And by now, Sunday, Arnie is readying himself to fly back to Boston for a few days - to vote, among other things. When he returns on Friday, we’ll have a big pow-wow to decide whether another attempt to sail the 200 miles to the Abacos is in the cards.

In the meantime, we have been keeping ourselves busy, having fun with the people we have met, who have also been stuck here. We have especially hung out with a couple from Canada who are crewing aboard a large catamaran – they left 2 days ago for parts further south. Our other buddy is an Australian sailor ( 200 ton master license) who bought a boat in Baltimore and is sailing it back to Australia mostly by himself after doing a walk-about of sorts to Cuba, the Caribbean, then through the Panama Canal and beyond. He’s been stuck by weather and waiting for documents from Australia, which he just got yesterday for his boat.

We went out twice to a nice jazz place with live music and cheap beers, and basically had a good time dancing and such. It was warm enough daytime that Ronnie even broke out her drawing materials and drew our “neighborhood” from our cockpit – drawbridge, boats, water and buildings. Pretty busy place.

On Wednesday, having heard from another boat like ours, Cheekee Monkee, waiting for “our bridge” to open, we sailed out for the day with our friends to watch the beginning of the Ft. Lauderdale to Key West race. It was a beautiful day with calm seas and winds, and we had a great time sailing again with good company. Cheekee Monkee came in second to another of our trimaran species who won.

The next day it warmed up enough that even the lizards reappeared, sunning themselves to come out of their hibernation. There have been lots of reports of iguanas ( an invasive species down here – the locals consider them pests) dropping out of trees and drowning, because they “freeze” at 40 degrees after a couple of days. This, as you may have heard has been the longest, coldest spell Florida has had in over a decade. And we were here to witness it!

We are now considering our major task for the day – clothes washing – so we will have clean ones to wherever we go when we return. Tomorrow’s entertainment will be to look at an all together too big catamaran that’s for sale to see what we are missing. Actually this is part of an ongoing debate about what we want to do with boats when we grow up. Tune in next week.