Publish Date: Tuesday, July 7, 2009
“You have to learn to trust your anchor,” is what our friend Captain Jim Mobley once told me. Well, tonight I am putting a lot of trust in our anchor! We arrived at South Benjamin Island this afternoon, and in between rain squalls we decided to anchor/moor in a little cove between two granite outcroppings. The plan was to do the equivalent of a Mediterranean mooring (Med-moor), using a couple of trees on shore as the tie-points for the stern. About halfway through the procedure I was thinking, “How do I get myself into these things?”, but tonight I’m starting to relax and enjoy it.
A Med-moor is used in the crowded harbours of the Mediterranean Sea where most of the towns have a concrete wall/pier where pleasure boats can tie up for the night. To make room for as many boats as possible, you put your stern to the wall with a couple lines, and set your anchor off the bow to hold you off the concrete wall. The important part of this mooring procedure is to get your anchor set as you’re backing up to the wall so that when you reach the wall your anchor will keep you from crashing into it. We performed this maneuver several times when we chartered a boat in the Greek Islands a few years ago, and it’s a little nerve wracking the first couple of times.
So here we are in the North Channel, and Kathryn and I decided it was time to try it here. Lots of boats use this procedure here because the water is often deep right up to the rocky shore, and the coves are often too small to swing on an anchor. We rigged up two 125-foot stern lines, and prepared the anchor to be dropped. We launched Kathryn’s new kayak, and she paddled into the cove with our new handheld depth sounder (a Father’s Day gift) to survey the water to make sure it was deep enough and free of obstructions. When we were ready, I dropped the anchor and backed into the cove, while Kathryn took a stern line in the kayak and headed for shore. Ayla paid out the line to Kathryn, making sure it didn’t get caught in the propeller. Once Kathryn had the starboard line tied to a tree, Ayla tightened it on the boat. Then Kathryn came back to the boat for the port line, and did the same thing to another tree. The anchor held well, and pretty soon we had a nice three-point Med-moor in a cozy granite cove. Okay, it took a little longer than that, and we had a few difficulties along the way, but the end result is fabulous!
We learned a couple things, so we will execute the procedure a little differently next time. The biggest thing we will do differently is take the 125-foot lines to shore first, tie them each to a tree, and then be ready to bring the free end of each line back to the boat. We can do this before we even drop the anchor so that we’re ready to tie up the boat when we back into the cove. Today we tried to do the line-transfers and tree-tying while holding the boat steady in a small cove, in the rain — what were we thinking? All’s well that ends well, but it could have been easier.
So tonight, as the setting sun glimmers on the pink granite cradling our floating home on each side, I say to myself, “Trust your anchor.”