Friday morning bringing our new boat from Stuart to Marina Bay in Fort Lauderdale.
We closed the deal on the purchase of Trident last night and now we are the proud owners!  We had been living on a 32' Fales Seeker at Marina Bay on the south fork of the New River in Ft Lauderdale. We put the Fales up for sale as soon as we decided to buy Trident. The only problem was that the Fales sold in three days and we had no place to live. We rented a storage unit and unloaded the Fales into the rented unit. Then, we moved into one of the floating hotel rooms at Marina Bay. We lived out of the hotel room for a couple of days until we could close the deal on Trident.

On Friday morning, we got out of bed at 04:45 and loaded everything into the car that would fit from what we had stored in the Hotel room. We put the rest of the stuff into Rosemary's car. We then took my car down to Lester's and had a nice breakfast. After that, we came back to Marina Bay and checked out of the hotel room, found John, the dock master, and told him that we would be bringing our new boat to Marina Bay the next day. We were going to keep the slip where we had tied up the Fales.

We headed for Stuart at 07:15 and arrived at the boat at 09:00.  We unloaded the car into the boat and just as we were finishing up Ed, the previous owner of Trident, arrived. Ed brought beer, champaign and soft drinks. A really nice send off.  We case off from the dock in Manatee Pocket at 10:00 and headed out to the ICW and south. The main reason for using the ICW instead of the ocean was that we were not familair with the boat and didn't know what to expect. If we were to run into a problem, it would be easier to handle it in the ICW than on the ocean.

As we were going through Jupiter, a fellow boater hailed us on the VHF saying how he admired the boat. He wanted to know if it was the same boat as was owned by one of his friends in the past. Since I'd looked at the Coast Guard manifest on the boat, I could tell him that it was indeed the same boat. He thanked us, wished us well and signed off.

Everything went very well until we got to Palm Beach. We got there right at rush hour and they had the bridge opening schedule so messed up that it took over three hours to get through the town on the ICW.

After the bridge debacle in Palm Beach, things went smoothly again. We made it through the Lantana bridge and anchored just south of it for the evening. We were securely anchored at 18:30.

The boat was doing just fine on her maiden( for us) voyage.

Saturday Lantana to Marina Bay.
We awoke to a nice clear day. I checked the fuel and oil. We still had over 100 gallons of Diesel and the engine oil was right on the full mark.
Ed had filled the water tanks for us before we left Stuart so we were doing just fine in the liquid department.

Since there were so many low bridges ahead of us, I decided to lower the mast to make the trip quicker. It took a while to figure out how to do it and it turned out to be a somewhat difficult job but I got it done. I'd figure out how to get it back up after we were in Ft Lauderdale.

We were underway at 08:15. The trip was very uneventful except for the heavy boat traffic around the Ft. Lauderdale Boat Show. This was the first time we'd seen the boat show from the water. It's much better from the docks. All we coulld see was a lot of people and the backs of some of the boats.

Upon arrival at Marina Bay, Mike, the weekend dock master, helped to tie us up in our old slip. We were back home in our new boat.

Since the boat had not been a liveaboard before, there were quite a few things to do to make her more livable. You know, cable TV, phone hook up, and such. Those things would be taken care of later. So far, Trident had performed without a hitch.