My kind of anchorage…

Cousteau is.

If I can set it there, I can set it anywhere…

It’s up to you, Cousteau, Cousteau.

Well, that may be a bit of hubris, methinks.

Motored out to Cousteau again yesterday to spend a few days in the company of a couple of other boats.  Got to the anchorage, dropped in 14 feet and drifted back letting out 70+ feet of chain.  Got the snubber on and set the hook solid.  I’m a prudent skipper, so I decide to snorkel out and check the anchor set.  Wow.  Nice set.  Buried deep in the sand, no twist in the chain.  Joe would be proud.

Get back to the boat and haul myself up on deck and see a squall coming in.  Hmmmmm - this was not in the plan.  I wasn’t too concerned; had a lot of lead time watching it come in from the west.  (They told me it’s common here for the winds to be from the east and the storms to move in from the west.). Then the swells started.  Keep in mind, I’m up on a sand shelf in 14 feet of water and there is a big squall coming across the bay at me.  What do you think is going to happen?

So I frantically threw everything movable from the cockpit down into the cabin then went forward to attach extra lines on the dinghy to keep it steady.  (The dinghy is suspended next to the boat by a line up the mast for short trips.). Checked the deck for anything loose and went below.  Well, the rain missed us but the wind shifted 180 degrees and the swells were nuts.  I’ve never been in a boat that pitchpoled so much.  Trouble is, now downwind is the reef.

So I set a pin on my Navionics chart so I would have a reference point.  My other references were the other two sailboats.  I was in a direct line and as long as I could see them  out either side I knew that I wasn’t dragging anchor.  Or that we were all dragging anchor.  The pitchpoling lasted a couple of hours, after which I went outside to do a walk-around.  Everything was fine.  I was sure glad that I had swum out to see the anchor set before the squall hit.  Knowing it was a good set eased a great deal of stress.  Oh, and the ‘Anchor Sentry’ app that I downloaded.

Went out to check the set again this morning.  Anchor was buried even deeper as one might expect.  Lots of noise in the water (small particulate matter throughout the water column) so no hurry to snorkel to the reef.  

Had bacon and eggs for breakfast.  Bacon was excellent.  At 

$19/lb US it had better be.  Probably try downloading some pics and video from the last trip out here while waiting for the water to clear.

Oh, and I think I had a shark on the bottom behind the boat when I came back from checking the anchor.  I say think because the noise in the water prevented a real good look.  It was at least 37 feet long.  (j/k - I have no sense of size looking underwater.). Whatever it was, it hung around for awhile then disappeared.