Lauderdale and No Name Harbor

Fri 1/29/16 & Sat. 1/30/16

Woohoo!  Its not raining.  It is cool, still in long pants and sweatshirts but we are dry!  We spent the day running errands on our bikes. One of those errands was to exchange American money to Canadian before we crossed to Cuba. Why? because the Cubans charge a 10-20% penalty to exchange American money to CUCs. They do not charge this penalty to any other country. This was a more difficult challenge than expected. We had to call three places before finding one that had enough to exchange then ride our bikes 2 miles to get it done. We stopped at a dollar store and liquor store on the way back. Of course I bought more than I should have making our trip back pretty miserable.  Vic and Kathy, who we are buddy boating with to Cuba have been in Lauderdale for almost two weeks. I was excited that we had finally caught up with them. They walked over from their boat ( about 2 miles away) with a friend of theirs and we had a really nice dinner at Downtowners on the river. The evening was comfortable and I had a great time watching the party boats with all their lights and music pass by us throughout the evening.  I really like this spot! Saturday morning we headed out for No Name Harbor in Biscayne Bay.  We were excited that the seas were down and we could run the ocean. After dealing with 20 bridges between Palm Beach and Lauderdale and weekend boat traffic we were looking forward to a calm stress free day. We used the   Port Everglades channel to go out and reentered the ICW at Biscayne Bay. Tom was actually in shorts today and I in capri's. Once back in and on the ICW we began our approach to the little pocket of water next to the state park called No name harbor. We quickly realized that the anchorage was going to be packed. so we back tracked to the anchorage outside of Hurricane hole. Even this  anchorage was busy. There were 24

 other boats including friends we are traveling with, Kathy and Vic.  After we anchored and were busy putting things away my phone rang. On the other end was Danielle. I was shocked. Deb and Danielle live on their catamaran, We met them over a year ago and really hit it off. Deb had seen my facebook posting about Miami as they were headed to an anchorage not far from here. They did an about turn and anchored next to us. It was great to see them. We had a great happy hour catching up. They are headed to the Bahamas in the morning. We are headed to Key Largo. This anchorage is popular with the locals so we were entertained with loud music until midnight.

                                  The little cobblestone street that runs along side the river
                                                                  

                                                              Our view at night

                                         Me standing in front of an interesting disc sculpture

   

                                                Laughter docked on the wall in front of the bridge

                                          A picture of Laughter from the top of the bridge

                                                More yachts, Which one do you want?

                                                  Cruise ships lined up at Port Everglades

                                      The view of the port and channel as we enter the ocean

more cruise ships