It Never Stops

I’m currently skipping the open mic night at the Bent Mast to sit around and babysit the boat.  Since the police visit this afternoon, I’ve mostly just done dayjob stuff, but in the past few hours the wind has blown up to what I guess to be around 35kn – ie, a little too much wind for my liking.

I’ve let out another twenty feet or so of anchor “rode”, which is what you call rope or chain attached to an anchor.  My anchor is a 35-pound “Delta” at the end of forty feet of heavy steel chain, with another three hundred feet of thick, strong rope attached to that.  The way the anchor is designed it has the most holding power if the pull is parallel to the ocean floor.  I almost always use all the chain, but I rarely deploy more than thirty feet or so of the rope.  The chain is heavy, and so the more rope I put out, the more the weight of the chain can pull the rode parallel to the bottom, and the more holding power I get.  Hopefully I won’t pull the anchor tonight, as I’m only about a hundred feet from shore and those rocks look nasty.  I’ll definitely be setting the anchor drift alarm on my GPS.

In preparation for an early morning departure – or possibly a late-night emergency, if this wind continues – I’ve just come in from pulling the dinghy out of the water and lashing it down to the port wing, and rewiring the generator to charge the engine starter battery.  With the wind howling, the unseasonably cold air coming from the open ocean, the heavy lifting, the pitch dark with the full moon yet to rise, the growl from the generator and the Perseids meteor shower overhead (I saw seven or eight in the ten minutes I was out there), this quiet, picturesque little bay has gone from welcoming to hostile in a matter of hours.  I half expected to hear a wolf howl from the top of the cliffs, or see an angry mob of farmers weilding pitchforks and torches coming through the parking lot!

It’s funny how quickly things can change.