Sunday, June 7, 2009

Anchors away!

No, it's not another porpoise picture, it's a reflection of our anchor on the bow while underway. After this experience we reflect on our anchor often so we thought you might want to also. We were about to anchor in Khutze Inlet for the night, beautiful. The instrumentation had been giving us a little trouble, but now we were getting divergent depth readings and were unsure of where to anchor as the tides can recede a mile here. Pulled up the anchor to go find another anchorage. It was covered with gross mud and seaweed that smelled awful. Pulled out into the middle of the channel where it was over 400 feet deep to wash it off.  Lowered all 400 feet of anchor chain. With about 375 feet out it slipped teeth in the winch and started falling to the bottom, pulling rope out of the anchor box at an alarming rate. We both grabbed the rope which was fortunately wrapped around the winch housing enough that we could stop it without going overboard. Now we have 1/3 of a ton of chain hanging from a rope off the bow, that is not going through the winch, and which we have to get back on board before dark. The pressure on the line made this rather precarious.  It would pull you to the bottom in an instant if you got caught in it  Anyway, we devised a variety of pulleys, lines and backup devices, and a few hours later we were feeling like "We are the champions of the world."  Which is rather true as our world has become a three hundred square foot cork that was about to bob in the waters of Khutze inlet forever.

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