Cool Bananas

My wife Laurel and I had moved on to our yacht 'Cool Bananas' that we had recently purchased in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It was way more than I had dreamed of 10 years earlier. It had taken me two years to track down and purchase the cruising yacht that I thought would be beyond our reach.

We purchased 'Cool Bananas' in the middle of 2005 and our son Jason and I flew to Fort Lauderdale to do the purchase. Everything went smoothly and David Bird, the CEO of Admiral yachts, South Africa,was a pleasure to deal with.
When we first arrived in Fort Lauderdale we were very fortunate to have met two people from Houston on their yacht 'Starship'. Roy and Stephanie were a great help to us, running us around and always offering to help. At the beginning I wasn't keen to drive on the right-hand side of the road.

Jason was keen to watch the launch of a space shuttle, so we headed up to Cape Canaveral in the yacht, where we had a birds eye view from the 10 mile limit. The launch was over in 11 seconds. We had booked into Cocoa Beach yacht club for a month. Cocoa Beach yacht club was quite social and we met a couple who are living on the yacht next-door, Daryl and Ronnie Birch. We had a few Sunday afternoons with drinks with them and their friends. This photo is typical of a Sunday afternoon.




During the month we had quite a severe lightning strike. You know the one, enough to do a lot of damage but not enough to claim insurance.shortly after Jason and I sailed back to Fort Lauderdale and found a marina berth in Loggerhead marina. I saw the lightning strike as an opportunity to get to know the boats electrics, as my background as an electrician all of a sudden came to the fore. Ray Marine were fantastic to deal with and within six weeks or so everything was up and running again. (This photo is of Jason repairing lights on the mast)

Six weeks later Jason flew back to New Zealand and Laurel arrived..........