Norfolk to Fort Lauderdale Day 7½ - Up the New River, and back again a bit

Caduceus
Martin and Elizabeth Bevan
Thu 9 Feb 2012 22:30

Position           26:07.01N 080:08.32W

Date                1230 Thursday 9 February 2012

 

Prior to arrival the motley crew cleaned up real good, as they say over here; modesty forbids the Skipper from appearing here but he was shinny as well..

 

Gary

 

 

It was then a wait for the 1130 opening of the 17th Street Bridge

 

 

The island that our apartment is on is the second island after the bridge.  The guest annex is the smaller square building between the motor yacht and the main house.

 

 

And just to prove it, the Mate is doing a passable impression of a garden gnome.

, minus fishing rod.

 

 

It was good to see her and minus a walking stick.

 

An interesting and somewhat circuitous route took us up the ICW and then right, west, into the New River that runs through the centre of Downtown Fort Lauderdale.

 

 

Due to slight misunderstanding of where our berth was we requested a bridge opening of the 3rd Avenue Bridge and went through only for the bridge to close behind us and for us to immediately request another opening to get back to our allocated berth.  The New River is busy with all sorts of traffic and the question was asked on the VHF if were inbound or outbound.  In good George Washington style and not being able to tell a lie I had to admit that it was a bit of both.

 

In my defence we were not that far seaward of the bridge as this photograph subsequently taken from the 3rd Avenue Bridge shows.

 

 

The Mate duly joined us bringing wheels support and whilst she went off for an appointment the crew relaxed and savoured the pleasure of arrival.

 

The trip took 6 days and 4 hours, we stopped in Beaufort for 19 hours 30 minutes and covered overall 849nm through the water and 892 nm over the ground, meaning that we successfully stayed inshore of the Gulf Stream all of the way and benefited 43nm from the favourable current.  The average speed for the trip, excluding the stop in Beaufort was 6.6 knots over the ground and 6.94 knots over the ground.  We motored for a total of 48 hours when the wind was too light to make sensible progress.  Given the fact that it is February it was a remarkably good trip in an ideal weather window.

 

A recce trip to Guava Island to view our berth for the next week proved satisfactory so tomorrow we will move the boat further inland to a berth where we can leave it for a week or so whilst we work out what o do next.

 

Elizabeth created an end of term curry and ‘a good time was had by all’.

 

 

 

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