Why you might want to think twice before eating that shrimp cocktail, Bob Perry talks rudder, and, apparently, Hart over at "his vorpal sword" wants the same thing I do for Christmas...
Truth be told, I'm not very good at anchoring in tight places because 99.9% of the time there is simply no need to. On those rare occasions when I do, the operative word is C-A-R-E-F-U-L-L-Y.
As I have mentioned before, if a boat has any kind of decent scope out the chances are that they are pivoting on their chain rather than their anchor and that makes it very difficult to ascertain exactly where someone's anchor happens to be...
For instance, yesterday in the anchorage we were all pointing in very different directions as it was a current/swell/wind nightmare. Later as the swell died down and all the boats were pointing (more or less) into the wind I realized that for a boat just coming in to the anchorage it was the anchorage from hell but did not look like it was. Our anchor was about thirty feet behind us while the boat behind us was sitting dead on top of theirs and for the rest the only thing I could say for sure was nobody's anchor was anywhere near where you'd expect them to be.
Which is why that inviting hole in the midst of a bunch of boats can be anything but inviting.
So, the prudent and simple thing to do is to anchor at the back of the pack... Fact is, we never ever anchor in front of boats and, as many years as we have been doing this, we have never found ourselves in a situation where we could not anchor aft of the pack.
On the other hand, most times when we come into an anchorage where lots of boats are sardined in a section we'll find there is plenty of room because the "anchorage" is often much larger than the area actually being used by boats and we do ourselves a disservice when we assume otherwise simply because boats are bumper to bumper in a particular corner.
Listening to Dirty Heads
So it goes...
Plans Change, Martinique version
1 week ago
