Anchoring, teamwork and trust

15º 57.554s 145º 04.780w

Wed Jun 05 2019

Living on a boat presents elements of danger almost on a daily basis. Just moving about a boat in rough conditions can be risky, and the general rule is “one hand for you, one for the barky”. Raising and setting big main sails is much easier with two crew, our Parasailor simply isn’t an option unless both of us are going to be available to manage setting and stowing that bugger, plus being quickly at hand in the event things get suddenly out of hand. Suddenly increasing winds due to squalls or other atmospheric phenomenon often require close cooperation to drop and stow a light air sail. Heavy weather sailing is stressful and apprehension can build; it’s important to know your sailing partner is there to support you.

For us, anchoring is the ultimate team effort. Isabel has anchored in a wide variety of bottom, wind, and current conditions around the world. She also has a sense of etiquette and believes it’s just plain bad manners to crowd other boats in an anchorage. We approach an area slowly, tour around a bit do map bottom depths and examine how other boats are lying to the wind and current, then do our best to drop and end up about 80 meters from all other boats once the chain is out, the bridle installed, and we’ve pulled down with a good bit of power to verify a proper set.

If you’ve ever chartered a boat somewhere such as the BVI or Belize, the charter company will generally state that the boat must be anchored or secured to a mooring ball by 1700 or some other time well before dusk. We used to get to the objective location by around 1600 and get set, have a swim, and then have a cocktail in hand by 1645. It was great sport observing the boats arriving “just in time”, racing to the last remaining mooring balls or spaces where anchoring was still practical. There was almost always a lot of screaming and shouting between whoever was on the bow and the person on the helm, generally a couple but often a big crowd on a larger charter boat. Occasionally there was a loud grinding sound as the keel contacted a reef that was obviously on the chart if only the crew had looked. Did you know you can get a reward from some charter companies for tattling on the idiots that scrape up keels?

So anchoring is where cooperation and trust among couples is easily observed from afar. We’ve certainly had our rough moments and occasionally we still disagree about proximity to subsurface obstacles or shallow water, but the more we do it, the more we gel into a team that trusts one another’s instincts. These days we motor slowly into an anchorage, discuss how each of us perceive the available options, then Isabel goes forward to operate the windlass while I position the boat where we want to end up, drop a waypoint there, then having considered the scope we’ll set and the lay of other boats to the wind and current, I position the bow where we want the anchor to touch the bottom and signal Isabel to drop. I call the depth, and she calls the chain length as she deploys it. Deploying the chain is a pretty serious technique; if the boat is stationary and she drops much more than the depth of the water, the chain can actually pile up on and foul the anchor. So once she knows the anchor has touched bottom it’s my job to gently move the boat away from the drop point, advising her of our speed over ground so she can judge what rate to deploy additional chain.

We generally agree ahead of time what scope we want to set, i.e. how much total chain to put in the water given the depth of the anchorage. When possible we’ll set 7:1, so when the water is 5 meters deep compared to the waterline of the boat, we’ll deploy 35 meters of chain before installing the bridle. We’ve got a Mantus chain hook on our bridle, and while we love how well it secures to the chain it is a bit of a pain to install or remove, so I always leave the helm and go forward for that task. Often we’ll swap places at that point and Isabel will assume the helm and back us down, head to wind, with increasing thrust until we’re satisfied the anchor isn’t dragging. I’ll join her at the helm and use the radar to examine our position relative to all the boats near us. I’m looking for a 90 meter radius of clear water around us. Once we declare victory we look at how we’re lying with the engines off, and hopefully we still have about the same amount of clearance around us. As boats respond differently to wind and current that clearance may be different by a fair bit, but we’ll generally have at least 80 meters spacing or so, and that feels safe, polite and respectful of other’s privacy.

It’s taken us a long time to build that level of cooperation and trust. We’ve lived on JollyDogs now for 5 years. We’ve been married for 21 years. We’ve known each other for almost 23 years. A couple of days ago we crossed the threshold of ultimate trust. Does that seem confusing to you, knowing we’ve trusted each other with our lives in this risky environment for 5 years? Just ask yourself, what’s about the most important thing to a woman, something she agonizes over, seeking just the right person to trust with the task??? Isabel asked me to cut her hair!

Well, as my US Army Yuma Proving Ground test director Ricky Douglas once said to me, “the only difference between a bad haircut and a good one is 2 weeks”.