Position           25:51.85N 079:26.13W

Date                2400 Friday 16 March 2012

It rained heavily and continually on Thursday so we gave sailing a miss; not good for the Mate’s hair do standing in the rain whilst we wended our way through the canals and the New River to the sea.

Friday was much better and we timed our departure to get some of the tide rise to help with depth but still with some of the flood to make manoeuvring easier whilst we waited for bridges to open

Susi was away with Fritz’s wife Alba in New York celebrating St Patrick’s Day but Henk once again turned out to help and provide an extra set of hands in case of crisis in the restricted waters of the New River.

We passed “our church”; one up on St Peter’s ad Vincula in Coggeshall, it has its own dock.

A phone call to Kamla brought her out into the garden as we passed our ex-‘des res’

which is close to the fuel dock at Lauderdale Marine as seen here whilst we were re-fuelling.

It was then au revoir to Henk and off in time to catch the 1600 opening of the 17^th Street Causeway Bridge’

Scary stuff leaving Port Everglades, the port for Fort Lauderdale as we were pursued by a pilot cutter, leading a container ship and then shortly afterwards by two cruise ships.

The Gulf Stream was benign as these things go, the Mate had pre-prepared dinner (ham and cheese pasta for the culinary club) and there was more than enough shipping to keep us occupied and interested.  3 knots of cross current did mean that we had to aim well south of our rhumb line course and this with the prevailing easterly allowed us to sail the course.