It was a miserable night at anchor. The rocking and rolling was worse than most trips on the open ocean. The swell was 8 to 10 foot in the anchorage. Bleck. When we awoke in the morning, Wanuskewin said that it was bad enough that one of the ropes on their flopper stopper broke. A while later we heard a loud crashing noise and we both ran up on deck. The anchor chain was being pulled through the windlass (the electric winch that raises and lowers the anchor). Normally we have the anchor chain snubbed.
For those of you non-boaters… we have a plate like the one in the picture below that we put over the anchor chain.
Then the ends of the two ropes are tied to cleats on the bow of the deck. And then you let out more anchor chain so that the anchor is pulling on the cleats on the deck, not on the chain attached to the winch. More or less like this picture – see how the anchor chain is hanging loose off the front of the bow and the rope tied to the cleat is tight?
What this does is ensure that as the boat blows in the wind or is pushed around by the waves, the anchor chain is pulling on the cleats, not on the winch, because the chain will pop through the winch – potentially pulling the whole anchor chain right out. Then as a secondary protection, we also have another hook on the anchor chain secured to a third cleat inside the chain locker below the deck. These three ropes make sure to protect the windlass.
We had snapped all three ropes clean off. The anchor chain plate was sunk to the bottom. We scrambled to find an alternate snubbing system as we listened to the chain pulling through the winch as the 10 foot waves hit us. This is one of those, “Ok, this isn’t really fun anymore” moments.
Dave grabbed a spare bow shackle and tied two ropes to it and created a temporary snubber to release the tension off the windlass. The only funny part about this is that Melissa had asked Dave a few months ago whether we should have a spare snubber plate. And in the end we decided that as long as we were careful about always leaving one side tied to a cleat when we deployed it there was little chance of losing it overboard. But Murphy outsmarted us. Again. Dag nab it.
Bottom line, we don’t really like this anchorage much. Time to move on. We hailed Wanuskewin on the radio and started to talk exit strategy. The next anchorage is 62 nm away. Which means if we don’t want to anchor in the dark, and we can only go an average of 5 knots, we either have to depart at 4am in the dark and arrive at sunset the same day, or leave in the afternoon and arrive at dawn the next day. We opted to depart at 2pm as Wanuskewin had enough of this place too. So this means an overnighter to Puerto Jimenez in the Gulf of Dulce. In the Gulf we should be much more protected.