Our biggest challenge lately has been sleeping peacefully on anchor. Maybe its because we’re newbies but we’re always worried that our anchor will drag at night and that we’d end up too close to another boat or to a nearby shore.
In one recent incident when Anwar and I were not on the boat, our son reaches us by radio to tell us that we’d dragged anchor and we needed to come back. We were only 5 minutes away by dingy so we returned immediately. We were at Ile de Piana between Corsica and Sardinia in a large bay where we had positioned ourselves at the entrance of the bay as the bay itself was shallow with a beautiful crystal blue lagoon in its center. After taking a closer look we found that we had dragged and not by 3 or 4 meters, but by over 100 meters and this took place in a matter of minutes.
The area we were in had a mix of sand and seaweed at the bottom, we always aim for the sandy bottom as it holds better but when the patches are small then its not so easy to get to them. What happened was that the anchor was laying on a bed of seaweed, the seaweed being so thick, long and slippery, the anchor didn’t dig in but was just laying there on top of it all so when the wind picked up and it reached 20 knots, the boat moved back with it.
We always go down with a mask to check the anchor and see that it is well placed but when the bottom is seaweed, dark and deep then its not so easy to see it and in this case we couldn’t. We moved the boat but this time made sure that the anchor landed on a sandy bed and we laid out more chain, the norm is to let out 4 times the depth but for extra measures we laid out 5 times.
In almost all the bays we’ve been to so far its crowded with many boats and yachts, some of which end up anchoring too close for comfort. What’s surprising is that the other boats don’t seem as concerned about this issue as us. We’ve seen sailing yachts come in, anchor and then leave their boat for several hours before coming back, not even hanging around for a while after anchoring to check that all is ok.
On nights when its windy or there are too many boats around us then we do night watch, so we take turns to stay up and monitor that we don’t get too close to others. I think with time and more experience we’ll get used to this and trust our anchor so that we can all sleep soundly!