A bad day at anchor
A headache and moving the anchor in the middle of
the night is no fun.
Ugh! Last night was bad. First of all, I had a
headache that started about 1900. It got worse through dinner over on Sula.
The wind also came up from the
southwest, blowing moderately at about 12 knots. Unfortunately, the anchorage
was completely open from that direction.
By the time we were done with dinner,
the waves had built to 2 feet, making the anchorage uncomfortable. I was still
feeling kind of sick, so I went to bed at 2200 while Roma stayed up for
awhile.
At 1215, I woke up with the
headache worse, and the wind hadn't dropped a bit. We were bouncing all over the
place. I couldn't get to sleep because my head hurt so bad. After an hour or so,
Roma came in to lay down and I had fallen asleep.
I woke up at 0200, and the bouncing
was bad, but at least my headache was gone. Looking at the barely acceptable
chart we have of the area, it looked like we might be able to get out of the SW
chop by moving a half mile to the south in another bight of the anchorage.
Unfortunately, it was pitch black.
Roma
does NOT like moving the anchor at night, especially when there is no moon.
However, I made the call and we decided to move. After getting the anchor up, we
moved over to the next bight. There was a large power boat there that shined its
big spotlight on the canyon wall so that we could see it (thank you!). We got
the hook down without incident in 40 feet of water and went back to bed. We only
got woken up three times by alarms (all false - better false positives than a
false negative!). Again unfortunately, the move didn't make very much difference
in the wave action: it was still bumpy. But unless we wanted to go quite a bit
further south, we didn't have much choice but to
stay.
Thus, we got only a few hours of
sleep that night. By morning, the wind had abated and the day was nice
again.
Posted: Mon - December
6, 2004 at 11:41 PM