We woke this morning to a forecast of possible thunderstorms later on in the day so after a quick breakfast and deck scrub we decided to get under way rather than waiting until after doing school work.School was somewhat traumatic and we were all short tempered by the time we arrived at our proposed anchorage of Monastery Bay. We had been watching our "BlitzortungLive" lightning spotting app and watching the lightening all around us, wondering if would come our way, meanwhile the kids had been particularly trying down below. We finally anchored with a little less space than we would have liked and pumped up the dinghy. Esmé now twigged that she wouldn't be able to go play with her friends unless she did some more school quick smart and soon buckled down. It took Esmé getting her buoyancy aid on ready for a lift over to BOAG for AJ to make the same realisation! Eventually all school work was done and AJ opted for an outboard engine lesson from Dad before picking his friends up from BOAG for a trip to the beach!
As I started to prepare a marinade for our dinner our anchor drag alarm (we use the app "Anchor") went off so I went up on deck to see what was happening. Over a period of about half an hour I became convinced we were slowly dragging. Around this time Patrick returned and he took over monitoring whilst I got the chicken in the marinade. I didn't get chance to finish before he told me it was time to leave so I jumped up on deck to watch the helm while he lifted the anchor. I had spotted an area where a few other boats had anchored which looked a little more sheltered so we motored over there, only to find a fellow MDR winter liveaboard anchored there. However there wasn't much space left and it was pretty deep. We spent a little while investigating anchoring closer to the entrance to Syvota but weren't convinced so had another go close to our original location but dragged again. By this time we were quite frustrated so motored out of the bay to try round the back of one of the islands.Here it got quite interesting because there was a tiny little bay which really was quite sheltered, the only question was if it was big enough. We did a couple of circuits and decided on anchoring with a line ashore... a first for us. After a bit of trial and error we managed to get the anchor down, dug in, and a stern line ashore, however we were a little close to the shore for our liking so Patrick rowed another line from the bow to the shore which helped a great deal. The bay is really beautiful, and we have significantly less wind than our friends in the original anchorage, however I'll be sat up for a good while yet until the wind has peaked and moved over to the east at about 1am when it should slowly start to die. Patrick has got his head down and we've got a route inputted into the plotter in case we need to make a hasty exit. Paranoid we may be but it's kept us safe so far!
Video of the anchorage here
No comments:
Post a Comment