Camilla Ransom
This morning the wind picked up almost exactly at 08:00 as predicted. We were sitting well, the anchor was holding and we weren’t moving. We made ourselves a biiiiig post-passage breakfast (any excuse!) and sat on deck to read for a bit. The wind by now was abut 15 knots, gusting 20 knots which we were still comfortable with. The forecast had it building to 25 gusting 38 later in the afternoon then dying down over night so we said we’d keep an eye on it. In the morning a catamaran had come into the bay and anchored near the harbour wall. By now though they were far further along the beach, their anchor not doing quite a good a job as ours. There was plenty of room however so the guys on board didn’t look too worried.
In the space of about 20 minutes, the stronger winds arrived earlier than we’d thought. The solar panels on the bimini were starting to look a little wobbly, and our neighbours were upping anchor to head into the marina. Hmmm, what should we do. I went forward to check the anchor and noticed the snubber lines had twisted themselves around and around the chain. We think this is probably due to the swivel we’ve got on the anchor. This meant not only were they not dampening the shock from the waves, but should we need to get it up in a hurry, we’d be in trouble. Tom set about trying to unravel it and with the bimini now looking increasingly unstable we decided to head into the marina. With the windlass not working this would be very hard work (for poor Tom!) as he’d need to pull up the anchor by hand, but with a combination of motoring against it then timing it to take in the slack we thought we’d manage.
He was doing really well and we were down to the last 7m of chain – the depth of the water. Suddenly the boat started jolting from side to side, it would be pushed by the wind then come to an immediate stop. Very disconcerting! It was stuck fast. The force proved too great and the chain pinged off the windlass and started rapidly unraveling back into the water. There’s so much force in the chain that we had no hope of stopping it (that’s how you lose fingers) so we just had to watch and let it unravel. When it reached the nylon line it slowed so we were able to tie it off. Now what?! We had over 60m of chain out and it would be an impossible job to pull that lot back up by hand. We discussed it and decided to stay put and ride it out. We were (unsurprisingly!) the only boat in the anchorage, the anchor was clearly holding, we had plenty of chain out, plus we didn’t fancy trying to squeeze into a tight berth in a marina in this wind. We detached the solar panels and put the bimini away and sat in the cockpit, exhausted! The boat was really rolling around as the wind had whipped up quite a swell, but we were doing OK.
Over dinner we checked the forecast, the prediction was still that it’d die down and by now it was certainly doing so. Just as we climbed into bed looking forward to trying to sleep, Tom said, “I wonder if the splice is going to hold?”. We’d connected the chain to the nylon line but had never tested its holding. Did we trust it not to unravel and send us hurtling onto the beach? No, we did not so we decided to do anchor watches through the night until the wind subsided. I did 23:00 until 02:00 and Tom did the 02:00 until 05:00 shift, which basically involves sitting in the cockpit being ready should The Bad Thing happen, and checking on the splice with a torch every hour or so. Today wasn’t exactly the quiet post-passage day we were hoping for, but it was an adventure.
