As Uncle Bob told me before I’d gotten my first boat, anchoring is not easy. In fact, he said, it’s one of the most difficult things one does while cruising. Many people have scoffed at me when I repeated those words, but I believe them. If nothing else, one could safely say that the technique of anchoring well is oftentimes overlooked, if not totally ignored.
The great sailor-writer Bernard Moitessier lost his boat, Joshua, in a gale in Baja while anchored. He’d rounded all of the great capes multiple times, sailed the southern oceans both solo and with his wife, kicked ass in the first solo, nonstop, around the world Golden Globe Race (*kicked ass until he was nearly finished and decided he wasn’t ready to stop sailing, so he did a 180 and sailed back around the Cape of Good Hope to somewhere in Tahiti, I think, thus doing one and half times nonstop around the world, solo.).
He did so with what we’d now consider antiquated technology and in some wild-ass conditions. All of that, then his boat was lost in an anchorage at a resort town. If he’d weighed anchor and sailed out into the storm, he and the boat would have most likely been fine; it would have been nothing he hadn’t faced plenty of times before.
But the dude flat didn’t know much about being near land. He had, in fact, thrown his anchor and chain overboard during the Golden Globe Race, reasoning that he wouldn’t be anywhere near land for a year or so, so why lug that weight around the planet?
In their book, Blue Water, Nancy and Bob Griffin said that one of the major draws to life aboard was that the dangers they faced while at sea were real and tactile, as opposed to the perceived, oftentimes inconsequential threats we face while anchored in day-to-day civilized life.
Said them:
The only time some people are truly happy is when they are away from things they don’t understand or things they resent. Some find this feeling at the seashore, others in the mountains.
I don’t really think this is an escape so much as a clarification….
…When the matangi—the big wind—comes, you and your boat must bear the full force of nature. You must trust your boat and yourself…. This is not a burden that weighs on you like the tensions of a competitive job. It is just a fact.
We’ve evolved over tens of millions of years to survive in some wild and harsh conditions, not to stress about passcodes and being put on hold for too long; which is to say, anything we feel we must do beyond the necessary act of survival carries with it a fleet of anxieties.
I read recently that this hyper-safe world which we’ve constructed for ourselves is actually endangering us; we no longer understand how to calibrate hazards—or react to them—and so our sympathetic nervous system, which controls the fight or flight instinct, has gone haywire, and is now easily triggered by minor, non-threatening things (which we then redefine as threatening), and, once triggered, this system goes into overdrive and doesn’t know when to stand down.
Lo! As Captain Ron said whilst misquoting Rilke, “It sure can be hard to outrun an imaginary lion, Swab.”
A real lion, to the Griffins, is just a fact. We know when we’re safe from it, and the body and mind can relax.
But now, as the Shark Tooth Hunter once said, we get the anxiety.
With sailing, we think of dangers in terms of storms at sea; huge waves and crazy winds and falling overboard and all of that, but for coastal sailors, the biggest dangers one tends to face are when closest to land—and typically, one is closest to land when dealing with an anchor.
Or whilst working on the boat.
One of the worst of a fleet of concussions came on a beautiful, calm day at a boatyard in Reedville, Virginia. I was headed north in my old Tartan, JADE, and was far behind schedule because of a series of breakdowns (roller furler, etc) and a wild night in Elizabeth City, NC, with Captain Chris and Sara and our sharktooth hunting hero, Eric. It was the Potato Festival, but the sharktooth hunter somehow interpreted it as a deep state convergence, or some such thing, and began interrogating the police about armies of robots and Biden and China.
But it all ended well with a cook-out in the Dismal Swamp the following day.
The concussion in Reedville: Captain Chris and Sara and I had sailed up from Norfolk, Virginia, the previous day and anchored in the small harbor. Across from the boatyard is the fish plant, and a huge brick stack rises 100 feet or so into the sky. It’s a menhaden factory, which renders fish oil and makes supplements, and it has one of the highest landings of any fishing port in the country—alongside Dutch Harbor, New Bedford, Milbridge, and Gloucester.
I’d decided to haul JADE out in Reedville and leave her for the summer so that I could get home to work my clamming season. I’d been in the Bahamas all winter and had somehow spent all my money. And for some reason, boat yards in the Chesapeake are incredibly cheap. So the following morning, the owner of Jennings boat yard, Larry Jennings, hauled JADE out. He and Captain Chris and I scraped all the growth off the bottom, and Larry parked her at the edge of the lot, near a stand of oaks. It was beautiful.
The boatyard is old school Chesapeake Bay crab fishing country, reminiscent of Beals or Jonesport. Fishing gear and derelict boats dot the yard and shoreline, and the boat shop itself looks like a museum, all of the tools for building the wooden crab boats still lying out as if just used. The crab boats look a lot like lobster boats, but a bit lower in the sheer and flatter. The engines tend to be amidships instead of down forward; they’re made for the bay’s shoal waters.
Sailors were slowly discovering the area, and it was becoming a popular place for snowbirds to store their boats. The Chesapeake is clear of the hurricane line, according to boat insurance companies, so lots of people who winter aboard their boats in the south leave those boats in the Chesapeake instead of making the entire trip north to NYC or New England or Canada.
Reedville is also the jumping-off point for Tangier Island, 12 miles out in the bay. I’d stopped there on my way south the previous fall. Seemingly lost in time, and being literally swallowed by the rising bay waters, it’s a seriously Methodist and isolated crabbing community. Perhaps akin to Maine’s Matinicus, only super devout. Salt water is literally bubbling up in the dirt roads and lawns, and the islanders once asked our dear savior, D. Trump, to build them a wall so to keep the bay waters at bay. No shit.
We laugh, perhaps, at that, but those Methodist roots kept them from supporting slavery back when.
Neighbor Jack either did or did not have CIA business in Washington, so he offered to pick me up, which was amazing. I went to work decommissioning the boat; stripping the sails and gear, cleaning her up, piling everything I’d be taking home with me. I took my nice, new mainsail out into the big lawn, and when a gust of wind hit, I tried to spread the sail like one does a bed sheet or table cloth—only when I lifted and snapped, the heavy, metal grommet at the top of the sail boomeranged back and caught me on the top of my head and put me on my knees.
So Jack had to drive the entire way home, and I missed my first month of clamming because I was recovering. Once again, I should’ve listened to Captain Chris; I should’ve sailed her home. I’d probably still have JADE if I’d of done so.
Boats are safest when surrounded by water. Like that famous case of the sailboat in The Perfect Storm in which the captain and crew abandoned the boat, a Westsail 32’, I believe. After the storm, the boat was found and was in fine condition. The captain and crew had risked their lives and that of the rescuers when all they really needed to do was trust the boat.
Easier said than done. A helicopter ride with the Coast Guard or Navy sounds better than 40’ seas or whatever was going on out there. There is, however, a contingency of sailors who do not carry EPIRBs or similar emergency beacons because they're of the mindset that they're putting themselves in peril and do not want to risk the lives of others.
(The search and rescue sorts I've known over the years live for that shit, though.)
At anchor, we are simultaneously safe and in danger; safe, because we’re hopefully tucked into some beautiful cove, clear of the matangi and big waves and big ships. Yet, at the same time, we’re closest to shoals, rocks, and dry land; the nemeses of boats.
Not everyone views life as metaphor, Jon, the old lobsterman said to me once, but of course we are simultaneously the most comfortable and most exposed when anchored in anywhere in life, as the Griffiths noted.
Back in Oriental, North Carolina—kind of a vortex of a place—I met Ivan, who was an Arctic sailor and probably the most well travelled, serious sailor I’ve ever met, alongside Mic and Bee on the gaffer Hannah, who have also covered some major miles in some major seas.
Ivan and his family were living aboard permanently. He’d been a motorcycle mechanic in the Netherlands, or maybe Denmark, until leaving dry land. With their two sons, he and his wife spent most of their time in Alaska, where they lived on the boat near the base of a ski area somewhere. They’d take their skiff in to ski, leaving their boat on anchor.
They’d just finished their second or third trip through the Northwest Passage, and were headed for the Caribbean and Panama Canal, and then back up to Alaska. They’d come in to Oriental before the gale that had driven me to the dock with the legendary anchor führer; they were across the dock from me.
After the storm, I mentioned to Ivan that I’d heard that Captain Chris and Sara had anchored up a shallow creek and had had a hell of a time with their anchors.
Got our shit mixed, the good captain had said. They’d been hit by a localized tornado that had charged up from Beaufort, and their anchor had dragged despite the fact that they’d followed correct anchoring protocol. They had a good anchor, lots of scope on the rode, and were in a sheltered inlet, but still, nothing they did worked, and they spent the storm in survival mode, doing everything they could to keep the boat in the water and off of land.
Ivan told me that anchoring in shoal water is a misleading undertaking. It’s commonly understood that the answer to an anchor not holding well is to let out more rode, or scope, (i.e. more rope and/or chain between the boat and the anchor), thus making the angle between the boat and the anchor as small as possible in order to allow the shape of the anchor to dig into the bottom as deep as possible; imagine sinking a garden hoe into dirt: the closer the handle gets to being parallel to the ground, the harder it is going to be to pull it out.
Simple. But I once met a cruising couple from Canada in a sail shop in Annapolis. They had some big, fancy boat. I’d picked up a used boom for JADE, and the guy working there (the owner’s son, I'm pretty sure) gave me a ride back to the harbor so that I didn’t have to shoulder the boom and walk the mile or two or whatever it was. He was also giving a ride to the Canadiens. They had a large Rocna anchor that they’d just purchased. We dropped them off first, at a separate harbor, and on the ride to where my skiff was parked, he started laughing then told me their story.
They’d come all the way from Quebec, if I remember correctly, and had spent every night on a dock at a marina, or renting moorings; they hadn’t anchored a single time. In Annapolis, for some reason, they decided to anchor. So they found a spot and dropped their anchor. Very quickly, they realized the anchor wasn’t holding their boat, so they rented a dock, went to Bacon Sails, and bought a bigger anchor.
That night, the same thing happened. They dropped the anchor, and their boat drifted away, despite the calm night.
A bigger anchor was needed.
So, they did some research, learned that they must have bought the wrong style (shape, etc) of anchor. Rocna was what they should have gotten in the first place, and they went back to Bacon and bought a very big one. As they were buying it, the guy asked them why they needed another new anchor. They filled him in, and after a bit, he asked about their anchoring technique.
Simple. They let the anchor out until they felt it hit bottom, then they tied it off. They had zero scope. Or 1:1. So each time a wave hit, the boat would lift the anchor off the bottom. If the tide came in a bit, the anchor would lift. Its flukes could not engage, nothing.
How they sailed from Canada to Annapolis without anchoring is one thing, but how they sailed from Canada to Annapolis without the sense it takes to either understand or learn how to understand the process of anchoring is another.
The Bacon Sails guy told them to let out much more scope: at least 5:1. He told them to research anchoring practices. They nodded, but still bought the new anchor, convinced that a bigger, better anchor was the answer.
As Chunk (Goonies) said, It’s far easier to fool someone than to convince someone that they’ve been fooled. Or maybe that was JFK. Or RFK.
Hence, the catenary and Ivan on the dock in Oriental, North Carolina.
There are myriad anchoring set-ups. In heavy weather, many boaters swear by using either two anchors on a single rode, or attaching a weight somewhere between the anchor and the boat; that way, the boat must lift that weight, or secondary anchor, before it even begins to put force on the main anchor.
Others use two anchors on two rodes. Or even three.
Ivan said to do the opposite if one must anchor in shallow water during a big blow. Instead of a weight, use a float or a buoy.
This is pretty cool. So stop skimming for a second.
The Red Wolf defines catenary thus: the curve assumed by a cord of uniform density and cross section that is perfectly flexible but not capable of being stretched and that hangs freely from two fixed points.
See, what happens is that if the water is shallow, the boat pulls the rode straight and holds it straight, so there is no catenary effect. The anchor rode might be close to parallel with the bottom, but the anchor itself is taking the full force of the boat’s windage—there’s no chain or rope flexing, lifting and falling, and ultimately absorbing huge amounts of energy in doing so. And it's all about energy dispersion.
With a float tied partway up the rode—picture a balloon buoy or something with significant buoyancy (not a milk jug)—a double catenary comes into effect; the boat must first pull the float underwater in order to pull the rode taught, and only then does the boat begin to apply pressure to the anchor itself. That takes up a huge amount of energy that would otherwise be transmitted directly to the anchor.
See, it’s the opposite of what one might expect.
Like if Moitessier had gone to sea during that storm down there in the Baja. Or maybe like the simplicity of fooling someone compared to the difficulty of convincing them that they've been fooled.
But not everyone views life like that.
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