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July 13, 2007 - PROBLEMATIC ANCHORING
by Beth & Al Liggett

Cruising always sounds so idyllic - sail into a beautiful calm bay, drop the anchor in 20' of sandy bottom where it sets instantly, and after a lovely dinner in the cockpit and a quiet night's sleep, you crank the anchor back in and are on your way to the next perfect place.

But then there are the things your Mother never told you...especially about anchoring. Like wind shifts at night putting you on a lee shore with choppy to rough waves bouncing you around. Or how about strong gusty winds sending the boat waltzing around and jerking back and forth on the chain/snubber; then throw some tidal currents into that mix for some real thrills! And did Mom mention rocks and coral? Or trying to anchor in the midst of torrents of rain and gusty winds? What about UN-anchoring in poor or perilous conditions?

Some of this stuff I've written about before. We were in Tioman Island, on the east coast of Malaysia in July of 2001: It was Monday night that the devil jumped us. Or rather, Tues. morning at 1:30am. We got hit with a Sumatra. A Sumatra is a local wind name. It comes from out of the west, usually in the early morning hours, and can blow 50 to 60 knots! The only good thing is they don't last long - usually blowing themselves out by dawn. It wasn't that big a wind this time, gusts to 34 on our instrument, but blowing steady 25 to 30 from the NW. We were totally unprotected. Seas built rapidly. Our anchor was holding well, but the bow was pitching up and down so badly that the snubber broke - twice! The chain was jerking badly on the windlass. There was nothing to do but leave. Motored slowly straight into the wind and chop, raising chain and getting out of shallow water and the coral heads right behind us.

By now it was raining heavily too. Of course, all our awnings were still up, nothing was stowed below, the dinghy was tied astern and heaving about, all our buckets on deck were full of water and soaking laundry, as it had rained that afternoon. Al did the driving, keeping an eye on the dinghy and oars astern. I was scrambling around below putting dishes in the sink, stuffing pillows around the slidables, trying to get stuff in some sort of non-flying, non-breaking mode.

It was too late to do an all-out "going to sea" type stow. It seemed to take forever to motor the six miles to a lee behind Tulia Island, where about 6 fishing boats were also sheltering. It was now 4:30am. Conditions were a bit rolly, but there was no wind behind this island. We dropped the anchor in 80 ft deep! Kept anchor watch until dawn, then headed to the other side of Tioman Island -- Juara Bay.

And what about the times your anchor snags on something "down there" and refuses to come up? Several times when we've been anchored on a rocky bottom or in sand but with coral patches around, the anchor chain gets caught under or around something. Usually driving forward and back, or around in a circle, will free the chain up so you can retrieve the anchor. But sometimes...

We were in Alaska. We anchored late in the afternoon in an interesting looking bay. It was deep, maybe 60 feet, but with 20 to 30 feet of tide, you anchored deep to hedge your bets against grounding when the tide went out. I don't remember if we went ashore or not. In the morning we cranked in the chain - and cranked, and cranked, and cranked. This was still the manual windlass days. The anchor wasn't coming up. The nose of the boat was going down! I tried driving this way and that, following Al's pointing arm as to direction. There! He seemed to get another 8 or 10 feet of chain.

More cranking. More driving. Little by little the anchor WAS coming up, but we realized we were pulling something else up as well. It turned out to be an old steel cable - probably debris from a logging or mining operation of long ago times. We were sliding along the catenary of the cable as it was raised off the bottom! When Al could see this cable he passed a line down under it and back to the boat.

We tied the line off on the bow cleat and dropped the anchor so it could clear the cable. When the anchor was back on board Al cut the line - there was too much pressure on it to try to release it from the cleat.

Another exasperating anchoring moment: we were in the Balearic Islands, anchored in the harbor at Mahon. Some bad weather was predicted and we thought we would reposition ourselves to have a little better protection from the winds. Again, the anchor wouldn't come up. Well, since we weren't going anywhere we just stayed anchored at that spot while the weather wailed over us. The anchor chain made periodic grumbling noises, even though we had a good snubber attached. When the storm finally blew itself out, we again tried to raise the anchor. Again, no luck. Scuba tanks and diving down seemed to be the only option. Al had been nursing a bad leg - cuts and scrapes and bruises from stepping into a hole on the street a few days before (a wonder he didn't break he leg), and was loathe to tackle this operation himself. A nearby yachtie friend volunteered to do the diving. Long story, short version: the anchor and chain were caught under a huge old (18th century?) ship's anchor. There was no way to pull it out. Our friend had to unshackle the anchor from the chain and we brought each up separately.

Getting stuck on your anchor, like the stories above, is probably not as common as the anchoring stories that tend to center around anchors dragging. No matter how careful you are, sometime, someplace, it's going to happen to you. Check out our earlier report about anchors for one of those tales.

You tend to remember those...Our first major dragging episode aboard BACCHUS, our first cruising boat, was in the Bahamas. We were anchored at Great Inagua Island – an open roadstead. The weather was calm; indeed, I think we had motored most of that day to get there. We launched our plywood dinghy and rowed ashore. We did not have an outboard motor in those early days. A few hours later we had stretched our legs, explored the little town, had a cold drink or two and headed back to the boat. Al was rowing. After a while he said, "How much farther do we have to go?" I looked ahead and thought, "Boy, it's still a long way out there." And said, "I didn't think we had anchored this far from shore." Yes – the boat had dragged, calmly and slowly away from the shore. Fortunately. And eventually, after rowing what seemed to be for hours, we caught up to BACCHUS and went back and re-anchored. What went wrong? Inexperience, tiredness, probably didn't set the anchor as well as we should have.

You would have thought we learned some lessons through that. But not too many months later we were in the Galapagos, visiting people in Academy Bay. One of them said, "Oh, I see you've moved your boat." Leaping to the window we saw that BACCHUS had dragged, and was indeed in a different place than where we left her. Al and another fellow raced out the door and ran down the path and around the curve of the bay to our dinghy, then out to the boat. Fortunately, the only other yachtie anchored nearby had seen what was happening. He went aboard and dropped overboard the big fisherman anchor that we had on deck. That stopped us dragging. The problem turned out to be that the anchor chain had dragged itself back through the flukes of the Danforth anchor with a change of current, and of course was just planing along across the bottom instead of resetting.

There are times when the anchor just will not dig in. You try and try, and try again, until reluctantly, Al will come back from the foredeck and say those fateful words, "We'll be OK if the wind doesn't blow." Digging into a kelpie bottom or where there is a lot of sea grass is like that – you just slide around. Having too soft a bottom does the same thing. But some bottoms are so hard that an anchor won't dig in either. In Saipan, just north of Guam, we tried and tried to get our anchor to set. The bottom was a solid shelf of "concrete" coral. We just finally put out the anchor and all 300 feet of chain and hoped that the "wind wouldn't blow."

A favorite place for yachties to spend New Year's Eve is at Patong Bay in Phuket, Thailand. It's a long lovely curve of white sand, and that sand goes way out into the bay. Ignoring the jet skis, the windsurfers, the Hobie cats, the water-skiers, and all the dinghies buzzing around between anchored yachts, you pick a place and anchor. You can see the anchor hit the sand through the clear waters of the bay. You can watch the anchor drag merrily across the sand too. This sand is as hard as a rock! A few years back we couldn't get the anchor to set at all. In the end we shackled our 15 pound Danforth and its 10 feet of chain right to the end of the shank of our CQR anchor. The two anchors in tandem did the trick. But it wasn't easy to get the Danforth back aboard while keeping it clear of our precious new paint!

If every anchoring situation was trouble free, I wouldn't be writing this. Each time you drop the anchor is unique, with its own sets of parameters to deal with. You just try to do the best you can and "hope that the wind doesn't blow!"

And here's what Al once told a young man who had just bought his first boat and was asking "lots of stupid questions" (his words, not ours) about anchoring. "Just remember," Al said, "all that anchor chain doesn't do you any good just sitting in the chain locker."