Our trip on Irish Mist to Florida 2014: Fort Lauderdale

Next year Trish Kelly and I are going to sail from Toronto to the Bahamas. We will leave during the last week of August and return around the last week of June 2015. Plan A is to arrive in Fort Lauderdale around the middle of December and fly home for Christmas. If we do this we would like the children to visit us in the Bahamas. For the teacher/parent kids this means March Break. They would have a week to fly down get a tan and fly home. The trip would require at least two airplanes which is a nuisance with two young children.

Plan B requires getting a larger boat as seen below.

Just kidding. Plan B would have Trish Kelly and I stay in Florida and have the children come there for Christmas. With this in mind we had a road trip to Fort Lauderdale. We were looking for a marina with a hotel. We needed a pool and possibly an easy walk to the beach. The first place we found was Coral Ridge Yacht Club. I had thought it was more marina then Yacht Club, but turned out to be a real Yacht Club. A very friendly Dockmaster showed us around. She said they had reciprocal arrangements with a number of clubs. They also had a number of Canadian members, no one I recognized.
Coral Ridge was perfect, but a bit of a walk to the hotel and a long way to the beach. The next place was Bahia Mar Yachting Center. It was a large marina where the Dockmaster told us she should have no trouble fitting us in this December. I have included a couple of pictures below.