Sailtime Storys by Bill Amt #2

A Beginners Sailor’s Collection Lessons Learned

The next dozen or so lessons learned

Learning to anchor – or better how not to anchor

If you are going to travel the ICW or sail anywhere in the world, anchoring knowledge is a big deal.  And by the time I was ready to make my first trip I did know a lot about anchoring before heading for St Augustine.   Let me explain.  A few months earlier, I made an attempt to renew my boating bond with my crew promising a very tranquil afternoon on a remote St, Johns Island beach – no authoritative command shouting, no raising the sails, simply motoring through a local knowledge cut and anchoring just off the beach and a short dinghy ride to where we could have a picnic lunch and enjoy serenity and privacy.  Pretty clever way of selling the sailing life and re-bonding with my crew, huh?  What could go wrong?  Thankfully an anchor and rode was a part of the sail-away package.

The day did start out pretty well – we found the “local knowledge cut” in the Charleston Harbor jetty just like the locals said and a couple miles later, I dropped the anchor, and Captain and crew went happily ashore.  For a while it was bliss until suddenly my littlest daughter innocently asked “where is the boat daddy”.   Well the boat was in sight but about a half mile from where it should be – obviously a case of anchor dragging.  But what to do about the problem was a bit of a quandary.

As I ran down the beach I thought about the Annapolis Book of Seamanship laying next to the couch in my house and vowed, once the present crises was resolved, I would diligently re-read each of the book’s chapters and promised to never skim a chapter again.  For example, had I properly secured the anchor rode to Paramour (I just do not remember reading that passage in the book) at the time I set the anchor, I likely would not be running down the beach to fetch my Paramour from the surf – another lesson to be added to the lessons learned book.   But at that moment  I had to get back to the crises at hand.  By the time I reached Paramour and climbed aboard and started the engine she was pounding stern-on to the sand bottom with a thunderous shudder and a heart rendering bang ever few seconds.

To make a long story short, after much panic and swearing, an hour latter Paramour and I escaped the snares of the outgoing tide and beach pounding with a severely bent rudder, that would allow a only wide spiraling path back through the jetties, through the harbor, and ultimately into the marina.  However, before managing such a complicated course to marina safety, I had to address one other little problem.  Paramour and I were now about 500 yards off shore in 10 feet of water and my now ex- wife and children were stranded on a beach that had access only by water.  There was no way that I could motor back to the shore and get them on board without getting caught in the off shore bound current whose breadth was less than the diameter of my spiral.  This posed a real dilemma that the Annapolis Book of Seamanship did not seem to cover very well in any of its chapters.

Fortunately on the horizon was a small power boat, and I knew if I could “motor spiral” to the boat, the owner would certainly welcome the opportunity to rescue my family.  Indeed I did get within a few feet of the potential rescue boat only to realize that the owner and his mate were engaged in an intense, amorous embrace in the boat’s cockpit and for some reason were quite resentful when an idiot in a sail boat pulled up next to them and began incessantly blowing his air horn to get their attention.  Thankfully, reason prevailed, and the couple concluded that I was simply a stupid guy who should not own a boat and obviously not a weird perverted voyeur playing some sort of a practical joke on them.  They quickly dressed, sped to shore, and rescued my family.   And that was the very last time my now ex-wife ever stepped foot onto the S/V Paramour and that evening I re-read the chapters on anchoring over and over again.

A couple weeks later I left the repair yard a few thousand dollars lighter but with my Paramour no longer worse for wear – although I cannot help but believe she may have been a bit leery of the skills of her captain.