Friday April 1: Delray Beach

Traveling through the Miami area is so different than traveling through the Upper Keys - following along the border of the Florida Everglades.

Instead of the waterways lined with mangroves and small islands, we spent the last couple of days boating past huge boats and very tall condo buildings.

The clouds and threats of rain were still around when we left our anchorage Wednesday morning. The rain held off - until we were just turning into the Hollywood Marina and then it finally decided to rain on us!

No problem as we had the flybridge enclosure up. We thought that if we bothered putting it up, the rain wouldn't come. Somehow that thinking never works!

A ride to the beach is always in order when in Hollywood and this was no exception. Breakfast out on Thursday as the winds let up and the rain never showed up.

Steve took a longer-than-remember ride to the grocery stores. Not bad coming back but a killer riding into the still rather strong south winds.

By this morning, the sun had returned  - it was going to be a good day to travel what we thought would be a quick 32 mile day to Delray Beach. We stayed here three year ago and have been wanting to come back but the marina really has no transient docking unless one of the long term lease owners has his/her boat out for the night. It's very hit or miss to snag a dock for a night.

Quick 32 miles? What were we thinking - of course we WEREN'T thinking. Lost track of how many bridges we had to go under (many we fit under with our 22 ft air draft) but many we didn't.

Things were going quite well until I made the mistake of misjudging that we couldn't get to the next bridge fast enough when it turns out we could have made it. Cost in time; 20 minutes at that bridge and 25 minutes at the next bridge.

Won't do that again ....

The views along the way are great. Many very tastefully done large homes and some just kind of "what were they thinking?"

And oh the boats - sorry. Yachts. One larger than the next. But only one helicopter this years. Must have been a bad year for the owners .....

Helicopter on aft deck!

Loved the one with a fleet of four jet skies on the upper deck!

We finally pulled into our dock about 3:30. Too hot to really even want to get off and bike around.

Steve did take a walking tour of the area. Tomorrow morning we'll bike to the ocean side to see what we can find for breakfast and then head out.

The plan is to anchor at the north end of Lake Worth. We've been there before and it's a great place to spend the night.






Best boat today: the one that just cranks itself up out of the water! No wake issues for this guy :-)