Tuesday March’s 27th, twenty eighteen
N26° 08.557′ W080° 06.543
We continue to swing on our anchor at Sunrise Bay in Fort Lauderdale. The process to clear into the states includes a phone check in when you enter the U. S. and then within twenty four hours you must present yourself at Immigration and Customs with your paper. There are three choices of locations in Fort Lauderdale. The closest is near the Port Everglades complex. Mangos introduced us to UBER a year or so ago and when we don’t have our car or access to same we UBER. All of our UBER trips yesterday were great, new clean cars and polite drivers.
The Port Everglades ICE offices are at the border of the secure port complex. When we checked in they didn’t want anything to do with NEXUS. So, I gave the lady our passports, when I mentioned we had NEXUS she attitude changed for the worse and suggested I should have used those first. Hands in the fingerprint machine and fairly quickly we moved on to the Marine Center to apply for our cruising license.
The process; sign the clip board and push the button. I pushed the button, I don’t know what I expected but nothing happened. I sat back down and in 10 minutes or so a nice man came out and called our name and gave me a couple of forms to complete. I did the forms it took 10 minutes or so and then I pushed the button again. Twenty minutes later he came back and we went through the forms and corrected my errors, got my credit card and off he went suggesting “10 minutes…”.
Twenty minutes later he passed by the window without stopping, twice. The good news, he had my papers in his hands both times though. Five minutes later he called me back to the window to say “my supervisor approved you for a full year”, he held up a thumb and said “five more minutes”. Ten minutes later he came to the window with a big smile and passed me our forms and said “Good to go”. Our license is good for the East Coast of the U. S. and for a full year. The odd thing is the license is only $19 bucks and the DTOPS sticker is over $30.
Our next UBER trip was to Sailorman. Sailorman is a used boat stuff place. They have a lot of used, consignment and new marine stuff and it is almost always cheaper there than anywhere else. Plus I get to visit the parrot greeter. Woody couldn’t make the trip, the Arborist/Vet determined he had an STI variant of Birch Bore… We bought a couple of things then off to groceries and back to FRACAS.
ML stopped off at a bake shop and picked up some sweets and stuff… more later