Boom Times Sailing!: Yachting Capital of the Galaxy

Fort Lauderdale bills itself as the yachting capital of the world, spelled out in large letters at the first city lift bridge. Without any other major reference I'll have to agree. I've never seen so many boats, big & very big. This coming weekend is Fort Lauderdale's holiday boat parade and apparently it's to dwarf the Boca Raton parade we saw last week.

Fort Lauderdale will be our last major stop before jumping over to the Bahamas from Miami. It is just so convenient and allows for a lot to get done! We are anchored in small Lake Sylvia surrounded by expensive mansions. The best dingy dock option is at a Raw Bar restaurant. It costs $10/day but this can be used as a credit at the restaurant so it's not a total waste of money. We've been sharing dinghy runs with our neighbours Brin de Folie. Within walking distance are banks, grocery stores, dollar stores, hardware stores, liquor stores, laundromats. Within biking distance (making use of our new folding bikes - so much fun!) is the biggest West Marine in America and a famous discount marine store called Sailorman that had everything new & used.

Cassandra took advantage of the nearby Office Depot to have us boat cards printed up. Our cards include an original work by our artist in residence (Cassy).
The transient nature of the journey creates the need for an efficient way to exchange and remember the details of all the great people you meet along the way. When other crews would offer us their cards we could only reciprocate with our scrawled details on a napkin or crumpled piece of paper. Now we've got a branding campaign going! While there is now a electronic way of exchanging boat cards, there's just something more romantic in exchanging the paper ones.

We are about a two weeks behind our very loose schedule. Many boats have already crossed over from more northern points to the Abacos (northern Bahamas). We just were not yet ready to cross and have been staying stateside to get more stuff done on both our Things to Get list and our Things to Do list. Slowly checking the high priority ones off we'll soon be ready to go though and are very much looking forward to the next chapter in this adventure. We'll meet up with the “crossed” boats & crews in the Exumas (central / southern Bahamas) soon.