After the couple of days at Cable Marine, we left on March 1 for Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale Beach for a month's stay before heading north. Fort Lauderdale is a place we'd always considered for permanently resettling for its boating culture, many waterfront homes with places to dock a boat with quick access to the ICW and the Atlantic Ocean and quasi-urban atmosphere (even though not at all like NYC).

Downtown Fort Lauderdale from the water

Bahia Mar Marina - our home for 6 weeks

Many mansions on the water in the Fort Lauderdale islands and waterways

Fort Lauderdale has a large spring break invasion in March - something the city is actively trying to reduce in favor of high-end residential development on the beach. So for most of our stay we were in and amongst the many college kids wandering the beach road in varying stages of undress and intoxication - all clearly having a great time. America has become a much more prosperous place since we were students. Our generation would have considered spring break in modern Fort Lauderdale as an out of the question extravagance ($800/night rooms and restaurant meals out), particularly for students allegedly suffering tuition sticker shock. Life is good these days. However, one night a marauding bunch of youths did manage to throw several racks of bicycles at the marina into the water and made off with one of our rusty, but trusty, folding bikes.

We always think of March as a terrible month - taxes need to be done and in NY the weather can't decide if it is going to be freezing, miserable, wet or gray. Not at all in Florida - we enjoyed temperatures in the 80's every day, hardly any rain and lots of wonderful sunshine. Taxes however did not go away, but after much grinding of teeth, they got filed - as we didn't relish trying to finalize them in the swamps of Georgia in mid-April.

Bahia Mar is a great marina with floating docks, in-slip pumpout, a beautiful pool with bar (but oversubscribed by see above) and relatively tranquil waters. It has a great location, within minutes of dining spots in the beach area and about 2 miles from downtown. All walkable but Uber cars are plentiful and cheap. Over the course of March, at Fort Lauderdale Beach, we dined at Burlock Coast, Bo's Beachside, El Vez, Coastal, Grille 66, and Sea Level at the Marriott. In the city, we ate at the Boathouse at the Riverside, YOLO, Piazza Italia, Asia Bay, Casa Sensei, 15th St Fisheries, Marti (Broward Center), Louie Bossi, and El Camino. We entertained a few times on the boat with visitors and family - making some excursions up and down the ICW. Even though we have a boat, we did take the Water Taxi a few times and an electric boat tour in the evening - you don't get tired of the Fort Lauderdale waterways. The Hugh Taylor Birch State Park up the road a couple of miles is also a must for an extended walk/hike as it tries as best as it can - and in some spots on its miles of trails succeeds - to recreate what this area, its swamps, forests and hammocks looked like before development. Although a bit of a hike, the Broward Center for the Performing Arts has a very active theater culture - we went and saw a performance of Dear Evan Hanson - or at least tried to before a sudden squall blew out a power station and plunged the theater and the whole downtown into darkness. We went a few weeks later to a make-up performance.

We took the opportunity of this longest of our stays on the loop to look at real estate, principally in the Las Olas area because nearly all the homes have dockage and the neighborhood is equidistant from the beach and the downtown. After looking at the south part of Las Olas, we determined from lots of comments that it was prone to flooding even from high tides. The north section of Las Olas, in particularly the Nurmi Isles section, had some streets that appealed to us - mostly because it is built on higher ground, the utilities are all underground (no overhanging wires) and the roads are lined with impressive Royal Palms - all of which should preserve the value of any property in this area. Just totally by coincidence a house in this area built by an architect had recently lowered his price to a range that we would possibly consider do-able. We made a bid, and then with a little back and forth, we found ourselves homeowners.

So now as homeowners, we decided to call a hiatus in our Loop - and finish it next year! We will make our way up the east coast next April 2020 and then attempt the Downeast Loop - from New York up to the St Lawrence Seaway, the Gaspe Peninsula, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and then down to Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts to the Long Island Sound. In the meanwhile, as adult residents of Florida, we now have to do such things as acquire a car, get utilities and cable for the house and figure out how a pool and irrigation system works - in addition to the thousand things that need to be done around a house. Last but not least, we took down our Looper burgee and will put it up again next April! See you all then!

Statistics on the journey to date from New York City to Fort Lauderdale

Time period: 5/31/18 to 3/31/19 (when we had originally planned to leave Fort Lauderdale and continue looping)

Total days: 305 days

Travel days: 87

Traveled 4444 miles

Passed through 153 locks

Put 355 hours on the engines

Used 5710 gallons of diesel