An early morning view of the tranquil seas in a roadstead anchorage along the Pacific coastline.
Anchoring is an experience that can on occasion make you bi-polar even if you think you’re rock solid stable! Starting with equipment selection and use, ending with wee-hour anchor watches wondering “why am I here?” the whole anchoring experience is just an emotional breakdown waiting to happen.
As most of our sailing friends know, we’ve done a lot (a LOT) of anchoring since our launch of Mahdee after her rebuild. We’ve also had some ah….interesting… equipment issues to deal with. Mahdee came with a stout horizontal windlass made by the Ideal Windlass Company of Greenwich, CT. Age indeterminate but likely to be between 40 and 50 years old according to the manufacturer. At the time of her purchase, the cosmetics were bad but Mahdee’s previous owner had told us that the electric motor had been rebuilt. So, we got out the wire brush, scrubbed and sanded away all the rust on the case, painted and installed our now spiffy looking windlass. We did have to install a new brake within the first year of use but beyond that, until 2013, the windlass was fine.
The motor ran great and continued to flawlessly do its thing until early this spring when it began to have intermittent problems. I authored several posts about the quest for a rebuilt or new motor. We couldn’t get the old one rebuilt because the commutator was no longer available; we purchased one new motor from the manufacturer that took 6 weeks to arrive and only made it through 2.5 anchorages before saying “I quit.” The replacement, from the manufacturer only took a month to arrive (hey, faster than the first one) but didn’t make it through three 30 second cycles with no load applied at all (no gears in the case to turn at the time). Seriously. David had already traced wires and tested voltages when the first replacement motor mysteriously stopped working. We also had taken apart the windlass and inspected the gearing for unusual wear or lash–there was none. We knew that the wiring for the windlass circuit was new with the Mahdee re-build and it tested perfect with the Voltmeter—supplying exactly 36 volts to the windlass. Yet, both the first and now second replacement motor had run with very high current (unloaded even) before their mysterious deaths.
Ever want a look at the gears inside your windlass?
Rather than simply calling the manufacturer for yet another, third, motor which would take a month to arrive and mere seconds for it to commit suicide, we took the second motor in to a electric motor shop for inspection and testing. We sought forensics of “what happened here?” and hopefully a rebuild or repair. The shop, Rite-Way Electric of San Francisco was wonderful. They initially tested while we were there and said “humm, direct short to ground.” So, we left it there at noon, they had it apart and called us by 2pm saying it had blown up (literally) and both giving an estimate of repair and advising us to return it to the windlass company for replacement. At the same time, the fellow said “Did you keep the original motor? We should be able to rebuild it.” When we told him we’d taken the original to several electrical shops in SoCal but the commutator was unusual and couldn’t be replaced, he said “no problem, we have a guy who makes them.” So, he sent it off to have “the guy” make the commutator and do the armature. Two weeks later we had a spiffy “new” old motor at less than ½ the price of a new-new motor. Installed it in the boat and it works great. Happy anchoring days without having to hand haul up that heavy 1/2” bbb chain!
The rebuilt windlass motor as we picked it up at Rite-Way Electric in San Francisco.
So, when the windlass is working flawlessly and the ground tackle doing its thing nicely, what could possibly be so emotional, huh? Well, I don’t sleep well if I don’t think the anchor will hold. I don’t think the anchor will hold if I don’t understand one of several variables: The currents, bottom condition, and expected weather…and well, how our particular setup will handle those things. Usually I’ve got a handle on the currents and the expected weather is well within reason. Usually the bottom condition is known and since we anchor a lot in mud, we’re familiar with the nice mud-handling characteristics of our various anchors—the 105# CQR, 105# Delta, 95# Danforth are the most often used. The 120# Fisherman style anchor is tied in below providing extra…ballast, and the tiny 30# Northill on the back deck ready to be deployed as a lunch hook. Before our Delta trip, we added a Fortress FX55 to the arsenal. It is identical in size to the 95# Danforth we already have but made of aluminum it weighs in at a svelte 32# that can easily be deployed from the dinghy or canoe.
The California Delta is the land of “two hook” anchoring, so a couple nights ago, we excitedly used the Fortress for the first time. After setting the CQR as a bow anchor, David took the Fortress in the canoe—well, I should say “on” the canoe since it is large—and we used it as a stern anchor fair led through to one of the jibsheet winches by the cockpit combing where I could quickly draw it tight and set it firmly. We were parallel to the current and within a boat length of shore.
Beryl inspecting the fairlead to the stern anchor off the port quarter late Monday.
All was good, but in the morning, with a hefty increase in winds we found the current:wind combination was pushing Mahdee out into the current from our little eddy location, the CQR anchor had very likely shifted (dragged) and our anchor rode from the Fortress was pulling that anchor sideways and even a bit opposite the originally set direction. We were somehow “down current” of both anchors rather than up current of the Fortress and down current of the CQR as we should have been. Our experience with Danforth/Fortress type anchors is this is the perfect way to un-set the anchor when you’re ready to bring it in. Certainly not ideal for keeping the anchor in use. We decided to retrieve the Fortress, reset the CQR (which I had probably done too much of a back-down set on the previous night) and change our two-anchor set-up to use of the Delta and the CQR both from the bow rather than one bow and one stern anchor.
A comedy of errors that I’m not in the best of spirits to write about ensued and let’s just say that more than three hours after we started at 7 am, we were re-set with Delta/CQR, the seagrass covered Fortress was on deck and we were bushed. I’ll leave it to David to describe our gyrations. All I can say is that we really should not ask David to think logically before 10 am because it’s not going to happen and that we should not expect Brenda to exercise any patience when waiting for David to wake up from a zombie state because that’s not in the cards either. The sand bottom in the slough at least provided us with a clean anchor and rode rather than the typically muddy mess that we normally have to deal with when bringing a stern anchor in.
With the re-anchor we thought ah, all is good. Oh, but then the winds came up—and up—and up. The forecast was for 12-16 knots with gusts into the low 20’s. The reality of yesterday and last night were daytime steady 20 knots with gusts to 25 and nighttime steady 20 knots with frequent gusts over 30 knots. Strangely enough, had we been anchored in our “usual” single hook fashion with the CQR alone, I would have been much the happy camper because I’m so familiar with it’s performance. However, here we sat in 30-35′ of water (yes, some of these sloughs are DEEP right up to the sheer edge of the soil covered with Tule grass!) with CQR and 200ft chain out, Delta with 250′ line out, in theory a nice angle to both anchors, and no real idea how it would all work out. That just meant I’d be spending a night awake with worry. The issue with a single hook set in this particular slough is that it’s 36-40′ from bow roller to bottom of the slough and if we put out 200′ of chain for good scope, adding Mahdee’s sparred length behind the bowsprit-set roller (say 65′), even if we set the anchor as close to the shore as we could on the windward side of the slough, in slack tide we’d trail back right into the leeward side of the slough quite easily. On the chart it measures just about 250′ across at this point. So, not a good plan–two anchors are needed here.
So, I sat up last night working away on the computer while I watched the winds, perpendicular to the currents, push us far out into the channel. The bow, with cutaway forekeel and high windage wanted to fall off the winds and the stern with deep keel was much subjected to the loads of the currents. I was fascinated much of the night with the adventures of Mahdee and in particular if we would make a complete spin (wrapping rode around chain) as we set an interesting spiral course on the GPS track plotted on the little Nokia with Maemo Mapper. The spiral set up into a pattern over several hours of what looked like the outline of an ear or a cooked shrimp. We’d also be doing a little boat pirouette within the spiral—back and forth we’d rotate counterclockwise 180 degrees or more and than back to the start via clockwise movement. Sort of like a real-life Spirograph. No 360’s thanks to the high wind and current loads. At any given time, there was no sense to where Mahdee might be along the ear/shrimp, but the changing currents/tides and the winds were keeping her remarkably retracing her path again and again. Now, 24 hours and four tide cycles later, I can say that I don’t understand it but I can quickly see that our anchors haven’t dragged and we’re pretty much where we should be: tracing the outline of an ear.
The “Ear” anchor track is saved as a route in green so I can watch where we are tracking–on the ear or not!
We had planned on moving to a different and less windy anchorage today, but as I searched the weather for various potential spots, I realized that we might as well stay with our known conditions rather than trading them in for something different but not necessarily better. This location, a slough lined with tule grass and tufts of palms here and there is lovely. Mostly empty there’s only us and one other boat within the mile that we can see. Nice.
A view off the bow today, at anchor in the California Delta
As the winds settled down in the early morning hours, David and I joked and said “oh, I love this place, it’s perfect” and then as the winds piped up and our lines were taut, we’d joke “Oh, I hate this place, it’s just too much.” It reminded me of my bi-polar response to the exact same conditions in the summer of 2010 in the Montezuma Slough just a few miles to the west of this spot.
Here’s what I wrote in the blog post https://mahdee.com/2010/07/15/paradise-cove-on-the-tiburon-pensula-for-a-day-of-baking/ about it then:
We enjoyed two lovely nights in the Montezuma Slough. We anchored in a wide and fairly protected part of the slough–not an official anchorage at all, but a place where no other boats were passing through and where we felt our single anchor would have no problem holding with good scope and swing. When the winds weren’t howling away at us, it was wonderful, peaceful, everything was just beautiful. I’d look out and around and sign in contentment stating it was just wonderful. When the winds came up, at first it wouldn’t be noticeable but slowly both David and I would be a bit more and more tense until finally, I’d be saying “oh, this is horrible!” and thus the time passed between perfect and horrible in the Montezuma Slough! The bipolar experience was funny and we laughed about it.
Yes, nothing much has changed in 3 years. Maybe I’m not laughing as much about it now? And, that’s the point—anchoring is just that, a bi-polar experience that can take you on an emotional roller coaster ride at any time in the process.
Anchoring at San Simeon in 2010
