Horror on Minim Creek
We were relatively comfy at anchor (A1 in pic)…had dinner and were relaxing and preparing for bed when I checked track on Navionics (didn’t save that one) and saw that we were dragging. Sigh.
It was REALLY dark (that’s what happens when anchoring ‘where the crawlers sing’) but at least a nearly full moon gave us some light. We tried re-anchoring but with wind blowing like stink and a wicked current running added to prior failure I had no confidence in the set so ultimately decided to move on down the creek, cross the ICW and try again at anchorage A2 in the pic. The current must have been running contrary to the wind because we dropped the anchor directly at the green anchor icon and somehow the anchor dragged forward. It was all pretty much a nightmare but at 10:00 or so we thought we had a good set and shortly thereafter I went to bed. I kept an eye on the track for an hour or so but the boat just moved slightly to make the little blob at the bottom of the yellow line.
I woke at 1 or so and boat had not moved. Good sign. The I woke at 3:00 and the straight line up from the little blob showed dramatic movement from either wind direction or current change (or both). Not for nuthin’ but that line represented 340’ or so - 3x the length of ride I’d put out! I then stayed awake watching the track for another hour. In that time the anchor seemed to have re-set and was holding, as demonstrated by the arc’d lines. At 5 and 6 it remained the same. As we prepared to pull anchor and head out I saw that we’d started to drag again! A quick departure and we were on our way.
Before we move on to the more hum-drum parts of the day, I’d like to note here that my
ghost writer (Fred) suggested I beef this up a bit to spark reader interest…his comments were as follows:
“ just plain dragging isn't good enough, you need to embellish it: You dragged over a family of baby ducks; better: you could hear cries near your boat, was it a lost swimmer? Then the cries slowly morphed into gurgling and then all you could hear was the howl of the wind...”
Frankly, I was put off enough without the dramatization.
On to the boring stuff…
Much of what we saw today looked like this:
These people really invest in docks! Some were so long we couldn’t even see the houses!
To make up for last night’s fiasco and lack of sleep we decided to go to marina rather than anchor…plus we were well chilled and damp from spells of light rain and lots of wind (plus low temps). We’re at Isle of Palms Marina - looking forward to a good night’s sleep!
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