A Midnight Awakening

I often mention about finding a secure and safe anchorage. Most of our cruising days and nights are spent at anchor. The boat is our house and we need a secure place to park it. For days and nights on end we leave our house attached to the bottom of the ocean by a hunk of metal and a length of chain. OK it's a high tech piece of metal designed to grab into whatever type of material the ocean floor consists of at that particular location but non the less it weighs just 66lbs. All of us yachties have what WE consider the best anchor. If you look around at cruising boats and ask, each individual will swear that his is the best. Truth be known they all work and also at one time or another they will all fail for some reason. Failure means that you and your house get to go for an unexpected ride. In an anchorage it could be you or perhaps another boat that drags. Some of the large local craft use only homemade anchors with little or no chain.


Last night, midnight to be exact we were awakened by our "anchor drag alarm" a feature built into our GPS. I got up to see what was happening. We had definitely moved, but had now settled in again. The tide had just changed and as the current also shifted we had gone from one direction of pull on the anchor to the opposite. In doing this the anchor normally rotates over and resets itself. In this instance we drug about 250 feet before it reset. We have one GPS that is always on and whenever at anchor has the drag alarm set. The photo is of the chart plotter screen showing our location for the past 3 days and then the little boat showing where we moved. While I sat and watched to confirm that we were stuck securely again one of the local boats drug to within several feet of the yacht anchored nearby before pulling up anchor and moving. After confirming we were secure once again it was back to bed.


Things like this don't happen often but if you spend as many nights on the hook as we do they will. You know what will happen if you play with fire! This morning all is well. One big reason for dragging is your anchor finding debris on the bottom, plastic bags, discarded fishing nets or other bits of trash. This is what is hanging from the recently pulled anchor of the local boat which was next to us.