The idiot

We had a pleasant last two days as we heading south from Stuart Fl down to Fort Lauderdale. It was a typical trip of hours  and hours of pleasant traveling interspaced with a few minutes of terror. First the typical.

We motored south on the inter-costal the first day and the most interesting thing that we passed (besides some “high rent” homes) was this, a house, built on a barge that was in turn floating on another barge! I don’t know why they went to the extent of this double flotation but it was different. The house was a bunk house for the crew of a dredger that was working in Peck Lake.

On the final day of the trip we took the ocean south to Fort Lauderdale and it was a pleasant day on the ocean. When we got to the port we found 6 ships anchored waiting to enter the port and 9 cruise ships leaving, one of them just starting into the channel. Just as we got to the channel, I dropped our sails and turned on the engine only to find out that the shift mechanism had broken and we were stuck in reverse! I took apart the panel and grabbed the cable and forced it into forward and away we went into the channel. Then the “idiot” arrived. As we approached the cruise ship, a large power yacht towing a 20+foot boat cut between us and the cruise ship. He cut it so close that I thought that the tow rope was going to wrap around the bow of the ship. Now, these cruise ships are HUGE and it suddenly occurred to me that this could be a terrorist attack,( run a 20 foot towed boat, loaded with explosives into the bow of a cruise ship in a busy shipping channel. WOW!!!). 

This is what we saw
 

Bad picture but this is the close up.

 In the picture you can just see the Coast Guard charging to the rescue. Well, they (the Coast Guard) got between the power boat and the ship as we fought for control  of the Snow Goose in the large wake of the power boat. It yawed us toward the cruise ship and before we could turn back the Coast Guard (now pass them) turned toward us with the guy in front pointing his 30 Cal machine gun right at us!!! MY OH MY does the barrel of a 30 cal look big when you are staring right down it… well, we got control and turned back on course and in another 3 minutes we were pass the cruise ship and had caught up to the power boat now surrounded by the port police and Homeland Security. After wards, we found a place to anchor in Lake Silvia, Fort Lauderdale. It was really nice to get the hook down.