Waiting on the Weather

Last night the weather came up as forecast. It was blowing steadily 20-25 mph at our last check before going to bed. Because we’re on an outside face dock, with the wind coming from the south directly at our beam, it made for a  bouncy night til things settled down about 2am. Cathryn actually lay in bed chuckling occasionally at first, as she felt  she was about to be thrown out of bed onto the floor. 

Today it’s raining, visibility is greatly reduced, and the wind blows up for several hours, dies back, then blows up again. We’re glad we’re not out there traveling in it.

Loopers are some of the nicest folks, and we have a recent example of friendship that is “above and beyond”.  In March on our shake-down cruise to the Florida Keys, we met Jim  and Sharon A in the mooring field at Marathon. They’ve lived full-time on their boat many years now (13 or 14?) and have completed the Loop twice. We met them at a Looper gathering, then had cocktail hour on their boat the night before we left the Keys.  Since then, Jim and Sharon have followed our blog, and Jim and Cathryn have emailed back and forth about various boating topics.

Three days ago Cathryn received emails from both Boatman Mark and Jim A who had read of the troubles we were having with anchoring. Both asked what type and size of anchor we were using and offered some helpful thoughts.  Since we saw them, Jim A and Sharon have taken their boat out of the water in Alabama (headed upriver to relatives in Michigan) to get some work done, and they got a phone call saying Jim’s Dad was suddenly ill and not expected to live long.  Jim and Sharon jumped in a car and drove to Michigan in two days. Despite this, Cathryn got a phone call from Jim yesterday wanting to review our anchoring procedure with us, as he had a new idea about what might be causing our problems. They talked for 20 minutes and we THINK he’s on to something!  Cathryn reviewed the steps we follow in anchoring, and Jim thought it all sounded right until we got to the point of “setting” the anchor. He thinks because our boat is over-powered for our needs (two 385 hp Caterpillar 3126 engines, more than needed to travel at trawler speed of 8 mph), that we’re probably yanking way too hard on the chain to set it, plowing our anchor through the mud/sand rather than actually setting it.

He suggested in the future we try using only one engine to back down on the anchor, and do it only at idle speed without revving up the engines in reverse, and see if it works better. His Lehman 135 hp single engine does a good job of setting the anchor at idle speed, so it certainly sounds plausible to us that this is our problem.  Now if the weather would just improve so we could get going again, we’re eager to give his suggestion a try!