Monday, March 29, 2010 Still in Ft. Lauderdale

Ft. Lauderdale, FL

At our mooring in Ft. Lauderdale

Goodness! The winds really whipped up over night and we had some vicious thunderstorms. The winds felt like they were trying to tip us a few times and the thunder was so loud and sudden, I swear I levitated like a shocked cat out of the bed.

It really came down in buckets throughout the day. Literally. I put out a couple of buckets for rainwater and they were filled within the span of a few minutes. We heard from Maggie and Jonathan – so glad they’re alright. Some people never see one tornado in their life. They saw two and their boat while a mess, is alright – it’s still floating. Needs work, but it’s still floating and they’re safe. After this season, they’ll never want to return to the Bahamas!

After our storms, it looked like it was going to clear up, then things started up again off and on all morning so we stayed on the boat. Around 4:30pm half way between high and low tide we started hitting something hard underwater. We both shot up top to see what ran into us but couldn’t see anything in the water. So it was something in the water, beloooow the surface. Whatever it was, was hard and whenever we swung parallel to the bridge between the 3rd and 4th bridge span, we swung into it. I don’t know what it was but surmised it must be part of the cement bridgework that we’d never hit before because we’d never swung this way. Our depth was reading 6 ft. on the instruments so whatever it was was not being picked up on the instruments. I called the marina office to see if they knew what was under us in this section but they never returned my call. They probably thought – she’s sitting on the bottom from low tide. The problem was, a – it wasn’t low tide, and b – we weren’t sitting on the bottom but swinging with the current into something. As the current shifted us back around we stopped slamming into whatever it was… Until… around 4:30am…