Equipment Failure

Our Rocha ready to be redeployed 

 We are starting our 4th night waiting out the winds. Good dinner of homemade pasta and some rum now I can sleep. Around 10 I drift off, exhausted and out. Bang…the boat shutters then, scrap…pop…bang and I am up the gangway to the cockpit. I am still disoriented as I look at the bow of a boat pressing and scraping amidships on the port side. “How did you guys hit us “I exclaimed to the handful of faces now too close. “No, I think you hit us” someone calls back. 

My eyes flash around looking for familiar boats that I would see each time I go up on deck day or night. Nothing around me is familiar. My brain scrambles as I try to understand why a big power yacht is near me then back to this boat’s bow pressed in to the rail pushing into my spare diesel tanks. Over the howling wind while I look for damage I half listen to the directions that the other crew is shouting and try to participate in the solution.

Slowly my brain engages as I strap a fender to the side, my BVD’s make a fashionable look but I throw on some shorts and start the engine. I am calling to Sheri to get all the systems up and to bring in the chain. I want to see us on a chart and figure out where we are. I have to go forward to assist with the chain then, people want me at the helm to backup, no…now forward. The Capt on the other boat has someone at his helm responding to his commands and has the others placing fenders and providing info. 

 I hear comments about how my anchor will fowl theirs  and we should tie together. From the wheel I see Sheri leaning over the rail, her hands on their bow and pushing. No…I start calling like a madman for her to stop touching their boat. She can’t push thousands of pounds of boat apart and I flashback to her broken hand getting caught between our boat and a piling. 

Now at the helm I engage the bow thruster and we pull away but the wind pushes us back together. I place the boat in reverse and press the bow thruster again…we’re moving to the right and backwards. We move away and the lines and chains separate. Nothing is tangled and we are free. I continue in reverse which is the only part of the enclosure that is open allowing me to see.

At each opportunity I have been removing the enclosure panels. Using the flashlights in here makes them reflect the light back at night and seeing is impossible. No boats nearby so I run to the bow to pull in the chain now coming in easily without an anchor attached. Our anchor was attached to the chain using a swivel and two shackles. I have a chain and swivel so a shackle must have broke. We pass by our recently separated boat and I ask Sheri to see if anyone is hurt. Everyone is fine and she tells them we lost our anchor. Now they can better understand the intrusion. 

Night boating requires a balance of light in order to see and we are not balanced yet. I ask Sheri to put together our spare anchor, called  a Fortress, that we have only used in thick weeds while I drive the boat back to our original spot.

This fortress is big and strong and only weighs 1/8 what the other anchor weighs

I drive in large circles between the two boats that were our neighbors for days. It is tricky in these strong winds but we launched and dragged the new anchor twice because it refused to dig in. The anchors blades are set at too steep an angle (good in grass and soft mud not hard packed sand) and while Sheri drives in circles I reassemble the anchor blades on the bow with a flashlight to 32 degrees.  The newly adjusted anchor is put over the bow rail as we slowly pull back then picking up speed in the wind gusts. Finally the chain snaps taught and the bow turns quickly towards it. This behavior proves that the anchor is set. A rush of relief in the realization that we were not going to have to drive in circles any more tonight. 

It is now after 1AM and sleep though longed for will not happen. We are so stressed after 2 hours of anchor practice. We have our phones and IPads set to track our location and an anchor alarm on. Through the night we can see we’re holding fast. At first light I start to plan the search for the anchor. We are in the dinghy by 7:30 and using a previous anchor marking that Sheri had placed on her phones map it only took15 minutes to locate the almost totally buried anchor. The anchor, pictured at the top, only had the top half of the roll bar sticking above the sand. By shear grace it was 20 feet from the bow, in water that is 8 feet deep and crystal clear.

I tied a line to the anchor and tried to pull it up backwards but it was very stuck. I begin the 15+ free dives to dig it out. Johnathan from the boat we hit came by to offer assistance and agreed that these equipment failures are true accidents. A couple of large dark stingrays also come by to see what I am doing. I first dug out the anchors shank and found that one shackle was still attached but no sign of the other one. Shackle failure was the cause of the accident.

If you look close you can see the stanchion is bent inward and there are some scrapes and gouges into the plastic wood… Not bad considering

I pulled the anchor to the boat and clipped the spinnaker halyard to the good shackle on the anchor.  Once we got the 55lb anchor on deck we stopped by their boat and acknowledged that this accident couldn’t of worked out any better. Very minor dings on Steadfast and nothing to fiberglass. We thanked them for their efforts in keeping us all safe. No injuries and unfortunately only 😳a story to retell in my older years…now a lot closer.

As an aside Jonathan and his crew were bringing this/his boat back up from St. Thomas. He is a sailing instructor and manager of Atlantic Yachting on the Hudson River near New York City. Some of his crew are also teachers there. I asked him if this incident would become an object lesson in the boating classes he teaches and he assured me that it would …everyone loves a happy ending! 

Thank God for happy endings.