Sunday 8/19
Last night, a nor'easter blew into our anchorage with gusts probably around 25 knots. This after gusts of similar strength from the opposite direction the previous night and day. Luckily, the breeze changed direction right after Sunday so we could easily reset our storm anchor to suit the new wind direction. Given the trouble we had with the working anchor not holding in the weedy bottom, I was really happy to get this done before going to sleep.
The prudence of resetting the anchor was driven home around midnight when Kate spotted a sailboat, maybe 35' long, dragging anchor. It passed between us and our neighbor, shown in the picture, being blown sideways at about one knot. (I'd guess there is about a 75' lane between the two boats that the dragging boat navigated cleanly.)
I tried to wake up the passing Captain and crew by shouting and blowing the air horn, but that didn't seem to work. No one seemed to be listening to our hails on channel 16. Surprisingly, the harbor launch seemed to be out patrolling after their usual last run. He responded to my horn, and I sent him after the draggers.
By this time, they were broadly a quarter mile to Leeward, but I saw lights on in the cabin and running lights lit. Soon they were obviously under power and in control of their boat. I couldn't tell if they had hit any other craft, but in the light of day, a couple vacant mooring balls lay in their path. Hopefully they bumped over one of those and woke up before hitting anything valuable or damaging their own boat.
There are too many lessons to learn vicariously from this experience to list here. Let's just say that it was better to see someone else dragging than to be dragging ourselves. (We had enough of that the one time it happened on the Florida sailbbatical.) Whew!
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