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| Re-anchoring, post drag. |
I read somewhere that there are 2 kinds of
cruisers. Those who have dragged
and those who are going to drag.
Any guesses which group we fit into? Scroll down to find out, or read through the whole
post.
As I mentioned in our CroatianRetrospective Light, Cavtat was a town that we thoroughly enjoyed. We met some fellow Canadians there (hello Quickbeam!) who
not only were generous with their time but also with some hard won information
about cruising in the Med. They’ve
been at it for 8 years and so have loads of great inside info. Cavtat was also close enough to
Dubrovnik to go for a day trip – a win all around given the cost of marinas in
Dubrovnik and the lack of anchorages near the city.
Fortunately, the anchorage at Cavtat was
also picturesque and quiet enough that we chose to spend some of our time just
relaxing at anchor. It was while
we were hanging around doing not much at all that we heard the noise – a faint
beep, beep, beep. It was rather
insistent, but not coming from our boat so we ignored it.
A little while later we looked out at
the anchorage and Janet said simply; “is that boat getting closer?” A moments glance and we both knew the
answer. “That boat” was a large
(by our standards) catamaran and it was heading straight for us.
You could almost see us connecting the
dots, the beeping was an anchor alarm.
There was no one on the other boat. If we didn’t do anything, it would hit us.
That.
Would.
Be.
Bad.
Janet raced to grab a boat hook and fenders
to try to fend off the other boat while I lowered our dinghy from the
davits. We didn’t have time to
start our engines or try to move out of its path and at the last possible
moment I was able to jam the dinghy between Maple and the crewless catamaran
fending it off.
With a little time successfully bought, I climbed aboard,
leaving our dinghy tied to Maple and grabbed a mooring line thinking I could
raft the heavy boat up to us until its owner returned but it was dragging by
too quickly. I jumped into the
water to take the line to Janet so she could tie it off, but it was not to
be. Back to the dragging cat I
went where I climbed out and made my way, dripping, to the helm station.
Fortunately, the engines did not require a
key and I was able to start them both, tuning an anchorage missile into a
reasonably controllable sea going vessel once more. While I was doing this, another cruiser had come by in their
dinghy to lend a hand and they started to raise the anchor. We were making our way back into the
anchorage to try to re-set the anchor when the owners of the vessel came racing
out to us.
The rest of the event was a tad less
dramatic, with 4 of us on board we reset the anchor and amid the thanks from
our fellow travellers I learned that this had happened to them once
before. In spite of it all, they
seemed rather non-plussed by the events and the knowledge that without
intervention, their home would have ended up on the rocks.
Turns out that they were in the habit of
only setting a scope of 3:1, meaning they had let out 3 times as much chain as
the depth of the water. We had
always been taught to work with 5:1 minimum which is what we had out, as did
the other cruiser who had come to the rescue. What’s more, the anchorage was known to have a weedy bottom
suggesting a greater degree of caution when anchoring.
Overall, I’m pretty proud of how Janet and
I acted when we needed to. When
this all went down we’d been cruising for grand total of 1 month and yet we
didn’t react like amateurs (at least I don’t think we did). That said, there are some lesson to be
learned here both from what we did right and what we did wrong:
- Don’t ignore strange noises, even if they don’t come from your boat.
- Anchor cautiously – nobody ever regretted being too conservative with their scope or size of ground tackle. When you are placing the fate of your home on your anchor you need to be able to trust it
- Act quickly, whether you do the right thing or the wrong thing, just do something. Catastrophe won’t wait for you to make up your mind about the right course of actio
