OK.  So the “woods” consist of palm trees, but we do have to walk over the river and through the woods to get to the other side.   In order to use the facilities which we share with Cooley’s Landing, we have to walk or drive over the 7th Avenue bridge.  It’s a drawbridge which goes up on demand, meaning there is no set schedule as there was with the Las Olas Bridge.  It’s also a little scary for Daisy to walk over it as the sidewalk is narrow and the cars speed by very close to us.  The walk is much more interesting on the other side of the river, as there are museums, restaurants, benches to sit on, shopping, etc.  Our side consists of houses, condos and of course the marina.  We are not in slips, but rather tied to a sea wall.  We have been at the New River Marina in Ft. Lauderdale for nine days now.  We went from a beach neighborhood to a city neighborhood and both have pros and cons.  We definitely miss walking down to the beach.  There is a lot more foot traffic walking by us and quite a bit of boat traffic here.  It’s a rather narrow river, although two large boats can pass each other while motoring by us.  Because of that, we have almost constant wave action.   It’s a gentle rock, however, and we don’t mind it.

We continue to have warranty work done on the boat, as well as making more purchases.  We now have our motor and dinghy up on the davits.  There is a Coast Guard rule that you can only use a “tender” to go from your boat to the shore.  However, many people around here travel up and down the river on dinghies.  Our neighbors from Australia, Malcolm and Kerry, went for a long ride up the river on Sunday and were stopped three times by the authorities, reminding them that they needed to stay near their boat and also identify it as a tender.  If you want to use a dinghy as a boat here, you must register it in Florida and put the registration numbers on the side.  We aren’t doing that.  Instead, we think we’ll name it “Seas the Minute,” however we’ve heard that it isn’t a good idea to give your dinghy a name that that relates to your boat, as then when it is tied up somewhere on shore it’s obvious you aren’t actually on your boat. 

We also finally ordered a watermaker, after weeks of research and shopping at various local watermaker outlets.  We were leaning toward the Village Marine Little Wonder, but decided to get a Spectra Newport 400 MKIIC (Compact) model which uses our 12V system.  It can be run at two water output levels depending on how much amperage we want to draw or whether or not we are running our genset. We also plan on purchasing solar panels which would allow for almost continuous water making at the lower amperage / speed without running house bank batteries down.  We did like the 110 volt systems for their simplicity and lower initial cost but the Spectra is touted to be more self sustaining with a longer lasting membrane life.  A disadvantage is that proprietary parts and chemicals are only available from Spectra and are quite expensive.