There wasn’t much to do in or around the marina so we left the
following morning. We were on our way to Fort Lauderdale and the mainland of
North America which we had left several weeks ago. On our way, we passed though
parts of Miami (see the picture below) and under nine bridges – four of which
were bascule bridges. Bascule bridges along the ICW normally open every half
hour, either 15 and 45 minutes after the hour, or on the hour and half-hour. If
you get there before it is opening time, you usually have to hold your position
and make sure you don’t bump into any other waiting boats, or any other
obstructions that might be on the water. It was Ann’s job to navigate us
through the bridges. She had to keep track of the name of the bridge (so we
could contact the bridge tender and tell him we were waiting), the vertical
clearance (so we knew whether we could fit under it without having it raised),
when it opened and where the next one was going to be. In addition, there was
very little wind, so when the boat wasn’t moving it got pretty hot on the
flybridge – and we all know how much Ann likes the heat. Needless to say, Ann
began hating those bridges. She really wanted to go outside again.
Before we did, however, Ann made some wise-ass comment about
not seeing any Miami Vice boats Hahaha! How funny that is! No Miami Vice
boats!! About 30 minutes later, we saw a small boat with a blue siren that had
pulled over another small boat. I thought how cute for the Miami Vice people to
try and please Ann. Then I swear, both Ann and I heard, “Don’t move or I will be
forced to shoot!” Yikes! These guys were serious! As we passed the boats, we
saw a police officer with his weapon drawn pointing it at a guy who was sitting
down on the police boat with his hands tied behind him. Now, I wanted to get as
far away from these guys as I could, but the channel was very narrow. What is
the protocol? Do you speed up and try to get away from any potential stray
bullets, or do you slow down and stay as far away from the incident as
possible. We chose the latter course of action and neither went to jail nor got
shot – so that must be the proper action.
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| Looking towards the sea |
 |
| Looking towards shore |
Eventually we did move off shore for a few hours. The
weather wasn’t that bad, though there were some dark clouds off to the east
that looked like they were coming for us. It was funny, you could look to one
side of the boat and see a torrential downpour that seemed to be slowly coming
our way, and to the other side, you could see nice puffy clouds.
We finally got to Lauderdale. There, we saw multimillion
dollar yachts parked outside multi-million dollar homes. Now I had seen this on
CSI Miami and Miami Vice, but had not seen it up close and personally until
now. I know some of you have been thinking that our 52 foot boat is more of a
yacht than anything else. You folks need to go to Fort Lauderdale. Our little
boat would have been a tender to some of those mega-yachts. That’s okay. We
like our boat J
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