Anchor Watched

Saturday I finished my pulpit support mounting project. It was the starboard base of the pulpit (the steel railing on the stern of the boat) that was supposed to be welded when I bought the boat, but the welder never showed up. I decided to forget about the whole welding thing, because it was quite likely the I would have to take the whole railing off (and now we are talking about a major amount of work).

Instead, I bought a standard foot support (60 degree angle) and would try to mount that. The angle of the railing is slightly more, so the gap between the foot and the teak would have to be filled. At first I thought about making a small teak wedge to slide under there. But that is pretty hard wood work (especially since teak is very hard wood). Then I realized this could be done by using epoxy. I have a pretty large amount of different kinds of epoxy on board, and there is a lot of resin (the `glue’ that is used to make fiberglass) that looks very old. This was a good opportunity to see if that old resin was still any good. Well, it did seem to work. I had made a sort of mold around the base (and plugged the old screw holes from the inside) and poured the epoxy in. Unfortunately the mold (made from duct tape) leaked, so it got a little messy around there. But in the end it appeared to be a pretty strong support.

That was done on Friday, then I let it all dry overnight, and on Saturday morning I did the drilling of the new holes (there are 3 holes to mount the foot, and I was able to reuse one). Did the old drilling exercise (with the inverter overloading and resetting plenty of times) but got it all done before lunch time. Now the pulpit is finally strong again, especially important since on the starboard side is also where the outboard is mounted when it is not on the dinghy.

For the weekend I felt like I was done with the maintenance projects and finished another book from Maria’s library in the afternoon.

Sunday morning I thought about going for a good bike ride (a long one without shopping bags!). But the wind had started to pick up (and was now from the west). Since this put the boat pretty close to the docks here, I thought that maybe I should stay on board and keep an eye on the anchor holding and the weather. That was no luxury. About an hour later I notice this motoryacht (that looks like it has been under water for a long period of time, and now needs some TLC) that seems to be moving backwards. It closely missed a boat behind it and I started to wonder what I should do. Call on channel 16 to inform someone (but who). For sure I did not feel like leaving my boat and try to mess with it. While I was thinking about that the boat had been moving along quite steadily, it is really amazing how fast a boat moves once it is off its anchors. And before I had done anything it had already reached on of the piers from one of the nearby apartment complexes. It probably ran into one of the poles there and came to a stop. A few hours later some people started messing with it, a policeman showed up, and another hour later a SeaTow boat came, towed it away. Only later I realized that if that boat had been anchored in front of me, it would have backed up into me, its path ended probably about 200 meters to the northeast of me,

Later that morning I decided that the piers were getting to close to me. The boat did not appear to be moving backwards by much at all, but it just did not feel comfortable. I started the engine, and made an attempt to unwrap the two anchor rodes (with the tide and wind changes, my two anchor lines had wrapped around each other). Got the first wrap out by making the boat do a circle around the anchor (that not easy by yourself, because from behind the wheel, you can impossibly see the anchor lines of the bow). And attempt to get the second wrap out failed, but it was above the water line and I was able to clear that by slacking on line of and move it over to a cleat on the other side. This appeared to help the anchors out, and I paid out a little more chain on one so the anchors were sharing the load better.

The anchors appeared to be holding well after that (the wind got up to 25 knots, a good 6 Beaufort), but since you always get a little paranoid with things like that I started the chart plotter. There the vessels track gave a good visual confirmation that the boat was nicely moving around in a circle segment around its anchors.

The cold front has almost passed, though we had a pretty chilly night (for south Florida standards). I think they even had a freeze watch for more inland around here.

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One Response to Anchor Watched

  1. Randy says:

    I can remember a few times when I had to put an extra anchor into the dinghy and motor well upwind in order to plant it well so I wouldn’t be up all night checking to see if we were dragging anchor. Once, we were, but luckily we were blown aground onto a nice soft sandy bottom.

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