Anchoring Follies

Administrator — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 01:43:02 +0000

Anchoring Follies

Chuck Hawley

Administrator Tue, 02/19/2019 - 01:43

Anchoring can be intimidating to sailors, especially if one has to anchor in front of an audience, or with an unfamiliar boat, or with an inexperienced crew. Chartering a boat in some gorgeous place can bring all three of these aspects together, for some rather unfortunate results. To prevent the inevitable shame from crushing some egos, all names and other identification has been removed from the following stories.

Clutch Play
On Moorings 4600 catamarans, which have more in common with volleyball courts than sailboats, the anchor windlass can be pressed into service to raise the mainsail, which otherwise takes about 10 minutes with the possibility of having a stroke. To use the windlass as an electric halyard winch, it’s necessary to de-clutch the chain gypsy so that the warping drum can be used. A quick flip of the windlass handle and you can raise the main with nary a coronary.
On this particular day, we sailed all morning and then ended up in a cute little harbor on the north side of the Island of Solta, near Split, Croatia. My trusty crewmember, who I will call “Matt”, offered to drop the anchor so we could have lunch. He swung open the hatch to give him access to the windlass, pressed the “down” button, and thus began a cacophony of flailing chain as the anchor fell into the clear water, followed up 250’ of chain. “Stay away from the windlass!” I bellowed, as it had appeared the Matt was going to try to tighten the clutch and the chain raced past his hands. About 40 seconds later, with all chain having been dropped, the bitter end of the rode was reached and thankfully the piece of line holding the bitter end to a padeye held.
Lessons Learned:
1. If you ease the clutch on the windlass, tighten it up again.
2. Once the chain starts flying into the water, stay clear of it.
3. You might just check that the clutch is actually firmed up before you use the windlass, Matt...
Castles in the British Virgin Islands
Not the kind of castles you’d find in Britain, but rather the type that form in narrow, shallow, and inadequate chain lockers. We discovered this while trying to raise the hook in about 25 knots of wind, with the wind coming from multiple directions, seemingly at once, and many expensive cruising boats within reach.
“What’s taking so long?”
“The windlass breaker keeps on tripping!” Initially I thought this was an allusion to Michael Pollan’s latest book, when in fact my crewmember, whom I will call “Andrew”, was dealing with a blown breaker. The breaker, incidentally, was cleverly hidden under the sink along with the pots, pans, garbage bags, and some noxious food that was well past its sell-by date.
“Let me know when there’s no tension on the anchor rode so it won’t trip!” I replied.
“It’s tripping all the time, with no tension on the rode.”
This problem sounded familiar. “You’ve got a chain castle in the rode locker!” I suggested, not realizing that this had a 10% chance, at best, of helping to resolve the problem.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with chain castles, this amusingly-named syndrome occurs when the chain stacks on top of itself until it reaches the “roof” of the chain locker, and backs up so that the chain gypsy can no longer disgorge it’s chain downward. This can cause the gypsy to grind to a halt, and thus was the reason for the tripped windlass breaker.
I left the helm, jogged forward to the starboard water tank locker, and lifted the hatch cover. Barely visible over the tops of the water tanks a gray castle of chain climbed to the top of the locker. All it took was a swat with my hand to knock the castle sideways, and the problem was solved.
Lessons learned:
1. Windlass operation instructions should include telling everyone where the circuit breaker is located.
2. Explain chain castles in advance of their formation, and indicate how to resolve them.
3. If possible, don’t leave the helm to solve problems. Had the anchor broken free of the bottom, or if something else had slowed my return to the helm, we could have been in deep yogurt.
Two propellers gives you twice as many opportunities...
Since the two hurricanes hit the BVI in 2017, moorings have been easier to get because the charter “traffic” is way down compared to the previous years. At least we were able to get moorings at Cooper and Norman Islands, which are frequently all taken by the time we arrive. After staying on a mooring during a blustery night, it was time to cast off on Tuesday, and it was “Andrew’s” day to be Captain. To help ease the strain on the mooring bridle, he powered forward with gusto towards the mooring ball to “cut us some slack”. However, he overshot, and we ended up running over the mooring buoy and pennant, resulting in a stalled port engine and an inability to leave, as the mooring pennant was wrapped around our port propeller.
Luckily, the water was warm and clear, and it only took a few minutes to free the line around the propeller using some sharp jerks. The technique that seems to work is to take the free end of the pennant and to jerk perpendicularly to the prop shaft, since the line tends to jam between prop and strut, or in our case, prop and saildrive. Regardless, in a few minutes we were on our way, egos mostly intact.
Lessons Learned:
1. Back away from moorings, allowing the prevailing wind to blow you away.
2. If you cannot see the mooring and pennant, put the engine(s) in neutral. Don’t
  “power out of it”.
3. Having a “swimmer of the watch” can resolve small issues in a hurry, but make sure that the engines are off and that you have a spotter for the swimmer.
Happy cruising!

Anchor at the Ready

Administrator — Sun, 29 Oct 2017 16:48:44 +0000

Anchor at the Ready

Chuck Hawley

Administrator Sun, 10/29/2017 - 16:48

Anchors

Safety Moments

Several decades ago, entering Morro Bay around sunrise, I was at the helm of a 30’ wooden ketch while the rest of the crew slept below. It was near a full moon, and the boat was bucking about a 3-knot ebb with her 4.5 knots of speed through the water. The red #4A buoy was well to starboard, but it became more and more obvious that the boat had slowly come to a halt, while the Atomic Four continued to hum encouragingly. The water was clear enough, and shallow enough, that I could see the ripples in the sand 4’ below the cockpit, and since the ketch drew 4’, it was an interference fit.

Not wishing to be known as the guy who ran aground, I backed off on the throttle slowly, so as not to wake the crew. Slowly, the ketch backed up as the current pushed it, stern-first, back out to sea. When I thought I had backed up enough, I altered course to port and sought deeper water. The rest of the trip into the bay was uneventful. It was an important lesson: no matter how accurately the channel markers may be placed originally to denote a channel, harbors slit up and the channel may be elsewhere.

Fast forward 30 years or so, and I was entering the same harbor on a blustery afternoon, only this time in Randy Repass’s Santa Cruz 40, ProMotion. As we reached into Morro Bay, I told the crew in the cockpit about my lesson learned when I was 18. My story was interrupted by a sudden deceleration, as the boat hit the same sandbar and swung around into the wind. The #4A buoy stared at me from about 100 feet to starboard.

My crew quickly brought a lunch hook on deck consisting of a 5# Danforth Hi-Tensile anchor and about 200’ of 3/8” nylon line. We were able to flag down a returning fishing boat and they obligingly pulled the anchor to windward (and, thankfully towards the center of the channel), where they dropped the little anchor. We took up tension on the anchor rode, and even though it stretched dramatically, the boat made a small amount of progress towards deeper water as each swell passed by. In less than 10 minutes we had kedged off the sandbar, boat intact, but egos in tatters.

Having a small anchor and rode that is ready for immediate deployment is wonderful seamanship rule for any vessel.

Having a small anchor and rode that is ready for immediate deployment is wonderful seamanship rule for any vessel. In fact, the anchor doesn’t have to be small, but it’s often handy to have an anchor that can be rowed, or swum, or even thrown into deeper water; options that may be impossible with a 45 or 60 pound anchor. The stretch in the anchor line can work in your favor, even if it seems overly elastic, since each time the boat lifts off the bottom for even a second, it will be tugged forward a small amount, and then the rode can be adjusted again.

On ProMotion, which didn’t have the convenience of a windlass, we ran the anchor line through a snatch block on the bow, then back along the side deck to a primary sheet winch in the cockpit. Not ideal, perhaps, but we could keep tension on the rode, and keep the bow headed towards deeper water, with each passing swell.

Which anchor to use? There are few arguments that are more divisive among sailors than which anchor is better, but I think many would agree that some anchor designs just don’t scale well when they are too small. A small CQR, for example, is pretty ineffective. My experience has shown that small Hi-Tensile and Fortress anchors, as well as the small Manson Supreme and Rocna designs are effective, even when they weigh 10# or less. What’s more important, though, is your ability to get them into the water, in the correct direction, in the least amount of time.