Aboard No Boundaries
July 15, 2009
When we lived in Baltimore and cruised the Chesapeake Bay, we enjoyed quiet anchorages along the Chester River or other rivers that flow into the Bay. Chesapeake Bay is huge, but it is not deep as oceans go. In fact, there are large sections of the Bay that we could explore only by dinghy, because our boat needs seven feet of water to float. A boat with a deep keel is at a disadvantage in Chesapeake Bay. Some of the best-loved destinations have only five or six feet of water.
Another well-known feature of the Bay is that it has indifferent winds much of the time. A 12-knot breeze is much prized by sailors, because in the sailing season, it is not very common. Way too often people sit in fine sailboats with sails flapping for lack of sufficient wind.
Still, we loved the Bay. It was a wonderful home for us for many years. I came to expect that when we wanted to anchor, we would have nine or ten feet, maybe twelve at the outside. We became comfortable anchoring in ten feet of water with little or no wind.
Now that we have left the Bay anchoring is a different challenge. We discovered at Block Island that the anchorage had very little area with depths of ten feet, and those areas shoal rapidly to shallower depths. Most of the anchorage is twenty feet or more.
The first difference between anchoring in ten feet of water and anchoring in twenty feet is the amount of anchor rode required. The term “rode” refers to the chain or rope that attaches the anchor to the boat. We have 250 feet of chain and 200 feet of rope on our anchor, but in Chesapeake Bay, we never used much of it. The standard anchoring rule is to let out 7 feet of rode to 1 foot of depth. For a depth of 12 feet, we let out 84 feet of chain. That hardly stressed our capacity in any way.
However, the 7X1 rule in an anchorage at 25 feet of depth results in the deployment of 175 feet of chain. That changes a lot of things. In a big wind, the boat swings on a circle with a radius of 175 feet instead of a circle with a radius of 84 feet. In a crowded anchorage, it can be very interesting to observe if all the boats swing together or not. If everyone puts out rode according to the same calculation, theory suggests that they won’t collide. However, there are a lot of factors to consider. Some boats use chain, some use rope. Each boat’s profile and weight affect the way it swings. Collisions can occur, and then nobody is happy.
The second big difference is the wind. In Chesapeake Bay we were often challenged to figure out where the wind would be if there were any. As we cruise north, we are encountering much more wind all the time, and therefore more wind when we anchor. It makes a difference.
At Block Island, we were on a mooring for five days. We originally thought we might be there for a couple of days, but the days stretched on. By the end of the fifth day, we were almost ready to depart for Newport to get the remaining supplies we needed for our genoa repair. We decided to spend our last night at anchor instead of on the mooring. It would save a few dollars, and we like being at anchor. We chose a spot, the anchor stuck, and I settled down to sew.
The people in the catamaran nearby were not on their boat at the time we anchored. As they passed by our boat when returning in their dinghy, I could hear the woman complaining to her husband that we were too close to their boat. We had been there for several hours already. The wind was blowing about 15 knots, and we had swung back and forth, as is normal, several times. It was clear to us that our boat and their boat were swinging in synch. We were not going to collide. However, the woman on the catamaran did not see it that way.
At first, Larry and the other man talked about it, and Larry even offered to move, but the man said he thought it wasn’t necessary. The woman, however, did not accept that decision. She looked at our boat and screamed that we were coming closer and closer. There is a common word of wisdom that consultants learn early in the business: perception is reality. No matter what the truth of a matter is, the way someone perceives it becomes a personal reality, and everybody must deal with that reality. In this situation, the woman’s reality became an unbearable burden to everyone. The man finally got in his dinghy and came over to our boat to ask if we would go ahead and move. We agreed and soon found a different place that did not threaten this woman’s perceptions about our location. It was not a time for standing up for the truth; it was a time to make peace. We were slightly inconvenienced by the move, but here is the bigger truth: if we had not moved, neither that couple nor we would have had any peace all night.
The next morning we left Block Island and headed for Newport, a trip of about four hours duration. Once again, however, it was quite different from Chesapeake Bay. The anchorage in Newport is small and deep. We dropped our anchor in 25 feet of water again, and this time the wind was about 15 knots and gusting higher. The gusty wind complicated our process, because the boat needs to face into the wind when the anchor is dropped. The anchor does its work by digging in a direction that opposes the action of the wind. The wind makes it dig in more firmly, if the ground holds the anchor properly.
Gusty wind is a real problem, because once the boat is turned into the prevailing wind, a gust may be stronger and even from a different direction than the prevailing wind. It may push the boat away from the direction we planned. We may even go in a circle as we play out the anchor rode. That happened today as we set our anchor.
Still, we “stuck” on the first drop and that was a good thing. We were getting tired of going in circles trying to get in the right position.
Our new life as full-time cruisers has adventures and challenges. We learn a lot and we grow a lot in this life. Anchoring is only one of the many skills we are honing. Come back often to see what else we are up to.
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