While I'm sitting here watching a movie (Exodus, 1960, Paul Newman & Eva Marie Saint, kind of boring) I'm listening to the wind howl. It's coming out of the SE which is pretty unusual. I decide to go out and make sure we're still staying put. I fired up the GPS and then went and checked various stuff out while it was acquiring satellites. The tidal current was very strong. The flood was almost over but the current was strong enough to keep us facing into it (North, more or less). The wind was blowing us north as well. So that meant we were headed north but our anchor was back behind us. In other words, we weren't facing the anchor like we usually do.
Anyway, I go back and check the GPS and we seem to be a bit further away from the anchor than we had been. Of course, we were headed a different direction, but still the anchor was something like 94' from our position. And, since I only had about 75' of rode out, apparently we were dragging. I waited a little longer to get a better GPS picture but it just confirmed my suspicions. Of course, right now I have no motor. Well, I have a motor but w/o the transmission it's pretty useless. I do have the dinghy tied alongside if I need to move in an emergency. So, I pulled in the anchor chain far enough to untie the snubber and then let a bunch more out. Once I had 100' in the water, I tied the snubber on and added another 10' or so. Been watching the GPS and we now seem to be staying put. The water was 5.6 meters deep so, at 110' (33 meters) I have roughly 6:1 now. I think what happened was that the high tide resulted in less scope, obviously, and then the wind from the SE swung the boat around dislodging the anchor. And, with the inadequate scope, it couldn't reset itself. Should be good now but suddenly I'm not tired so I'll be up for a little while watching it.
You might have to click on the picture to get the bigger version to follow, but here's what we're looking at on the GPS:
See the little anchor symbol under the "0073"? That's about where our anchor was originally. The little black dotted lines show our track. The dark bunch of squiggles to the SW of our anchor basically shows how we just swung back and forth at the end of our tether. When I first went and checked things tonight, we were located at the dark mass of dots just below the N24°09.600' parallel. We still looked to be sort of staying put but we were definitely further from the anchor than we had been. When I went back and checked again, we had wandered up to the next grouping of dots and were headed further north. At that point I let out more chain and the boat came to a stop and started swinging back and forth on its new tether. The point that it stopped moving away from the anchor is where the track makes a sharp turn to the NW just above the N24°09.610' label. The white arrow is pointing to the symbol for our boat.
I don't think I'm the only one who dragged because there are several boats that are still pretty much the same distance from me as before although I'm definitely further away from some others.
So it goes.
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