Days 21-23, Stuck in Stuart and then to Ft. Lauderdale

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The weather in South Florida was really bad this past week. Our plan was to leave Stuart on Tuesday after taking an extra day to relax and recharge there. However, mother nature had other ideas. We stayed put until today when the weather finally improved, a total of five days in Stuart. Finally, this morning, we woke up to a gorgeous day and were under way at 6:40 a.m. 

I had a bad cold the whole time we were in Stuart, but we decided to go out to dinner one night because I couldn't stand just being on the boat for so many days straight. It was raining and there was some flooding, but we put on our raincoats and grabbed an Uber to town. As you can see, one of us is happy to be in photos no matter if it's a bad hair day. The other eats vegan food.

A bad hair day and definitely not vegan

A nice vegan meal

Dinner was nice, but when we got back, Gimel decided that since we did not take him with us, he would munch on our salon TV remote control for dinner. First time he's ever destroyed anything like this.

The remote was a goner. But, I googled how to pair a remote with a TV, and I took one of the other TV remotes and programmed the salon TV to it, and now we have a remote again, and we'll be more careful. Got the TV remote fixed just in time to watch the Ravens beat up on the Bengals.

We began on the ICW today, and we used a handy booklet that I highly recommend. It is a flip chart that lists every bridge, as well as the height restrictions, VHF channel to reach the bridge tender, opening policies, etc. A must-have for the ICW. I kept it at the helm for quick access.

The ICW was flat as a pancake today, and the beauty of the river did not escape us.

In Jupiter, we gawked at the houses on the water. Yes, we have a 71' yacht, but these people are at a whole nother level (I did that for you Dad - for those who don't know him, retired English professor who loves to correct his kids' grammar).





I hope these guys have flood insurance because all of them are really close to the water level. And sea levels are rising!

As we approached Palm beach, I heard from a captain friend of mine that he knows another captain who was running offshore nearby and said that it was flat and calm and beautiful. We had assumed that after the storms we just had, the seas would still be rough, and our apps led us to believe it was an inside day. However, the information was from a reliable source.

We decided to move outside at Palm Beach and run the approximately 40 miles outside to Ft. Lauderdale rather than our original destination this morning of Boynton Beach. This required some maneuvering of marina reservations, but it all worked out. We added a couple of hours to our trip today, but saved a lot of time because it's so much faster to travel in the ocean.

It was, as advertised, very calm, with following seas. As you can see from the MFD on the right side, the water was over 500' deep. 

When received Empty Nest, we stayed in Ft. Lauderdale, so we were familiar with the area by the inlet. That's where I did my training. In fact, we ended up with a reservation at the same marina where we stayed back in May/June for 10 days during commissioning. We were given a challenging slip with barely enough room in the fairway to turn around so I could back in. Ann guided me on the headphones as I backed into the slip. Only after we were tied up did I look and see that I had less than two feet of margin to the boat next to us in the slip, another 70 footer. It's probably good that I didn't realize just how close this was. No poles in between. Sheesh!

I'm still not 100% healthy, and traveling today really wore me out. Ann was nice enough to cook dinner for both of us. Gnocchi with fresh onions and mushrooms. Our last dinner in transit. Was delicious.

If all goes well, tomorrow is our last travel day for a while (if you don't count flying home for Thanksgiving in a few days). We'll go outside to Port of Miami, and then up the ICW a few miles to our marina. I recently learned that we'll be docked on a fixed, concrete wall. Not my favorite setup, but we'll make it work. It will be our home for four months, and then we'll do this trip in reverse.

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