Jan. 14:

I must confess I fall asleep these evenings after rowing very easily and often this has been while trying to write about the day. So I think anyone who has tried to read all of the daily log entries might be able to tell when they were written. I do better early in the morning and this morning I decided to get up early and finish yesterday’s. I hope it showed and I apologize for any others that might look like they were written by my forehead falling on the keys.

We left for the Silver Palm Park at 7:30 and were on the water rowing south at 8:30. The first miles were quiet and my pace was steady and our land speed was 4.3 for the first two hours. The passage was absolutely straight and a tall pink apartment building served as a stern marker for the whole time and finally disappeared. The closer to Ft. Lauderdale we came the larger the boats became. But the largest boats are not the wake producers. Usually they are tied up. I doubt even the wealthiest of owners of these yachts can enjoy paying their fuel bills.

The main harbor of Ft. Lauderdale is surrounded by many canals that divide the land into a grid. Every house is on the waterfront and every house has at least one large boat and usually a few Seadoos, which I liken to gnats. The channel of the ICW became crowded with boats coming from all directions. That meant their wakes came from every direction. More than that the vertical walls of the canal in most places reflected the wakes several times so that the passing of a powerboat continued to be felt for several minutes. Finally I got used to this struggle by necessity and powered us through some swells I was sure would fill our boat in a second. We challenged the seaworthiness of the boat more than ever before and it met the test.

The harbor was crowded with cruise ships large tankers and other ships. None moved while we passed through but there were plenty of smaller boats in the 100-200 ft. class to make up for it. We passed by the largest sloop I have ever seen tied up near the 17^th Street Bridge. It had to have been 150’ long and its mast was probably over 100’. Another, almost as large, was tied up near by. These boats impress me much more than the monster powerboats.

Finally getting to the other side of the channel we found the inlet to the boat ramps at John U. Lloyd State Park where we found Jason Crush, Executive Director of the Habitat for Humanity of Broward County. He and a friend had watched us come under the bridge and had then driven around to meet us. Jason drove me to Boca Raton to pick up our car. We then met the whole team at a restaurant for dinner and went to their office where I gave a short talk about TOTO and Green plumbing. This was an absolutely delightful gang of people we will both remember for a long time.