We started our trip to Boston today (same day Eliot and Caroline left Fargo for Boston). We left Miami and made it to Fort Lauderdale. We experienced our first rain squall while traveling--fortunately we reduced sail early enough even though afterwards we realized that we did it the hard way. As the front hit we saw 40 mph gusts!
We didn't do well with lift bridges today. For the first one the bridge attendant did not respond on the radio until after we missed one opening (every 30 minutes). So we waited about 45 minutes total to get through that one. We are guessing that he couldn't understand us on the radio due to water in our radio handset's microphone.
Then we tried twice to anchor in Lake Sylvia. Twice our anchor did not hold firm. It was 15' deep so we would need to put out much more chain than normal but it was kind of crowded so I was a bit miserly about it, hence the dragging. Also it was not very windy so all of the boats had their chain hanging straight down. Therefore we didn't have a very good idea which way their chain ran along the bottom (depends on which way it was most recently strongly blowing) so if the wind did come up we would possibly end up too close to someone. Anyways, we weren't feeling great about it so decided to move on.
Upon leaving there we saw the next bridge wide open as a boat had just gone through. We weren't close enough to also make it through so ended up waiting 30 minutes there. Lots of nice big yachts to look at there. We saw the 285 yacht Lonian loading two jet skis and a 30 foot sport boat into a huge opening compartment on it's side!
Now we are in Sunrise Bay, just a couple miles north of Lake Sylvia. We stayed here on our way south too.
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