Oh Dorothy, is That Your House Spinning Above Me?

     Or, What is Boca Ciega Bay doing in Kansas?

_______

May 20, 2013

     People who make no mistakes lack boldness and the spirit of adventure.” 

Norman Vincent Peale

I woke up that Friday morning, anchored out, because something didn’t feel right. I looked out the port to see all 360º of Boca Ciega Bay passing by my view, as if I were a camera panning in a circle. Huh??

I stepped into the cockpit, and sure enough, the boat was slowly spinning. It did two complete circles that I’m aware of. Then the squall hit.

I hadn’t planned on anchoring out the day before. I had picked up my new rudder; the old one lay on the ground at the club. A friend was going to use my dinghy and outboard to “tugboat” me and my boat out to deeper water in Boca Ciega Bay so he could install the new rudder. Meanwhile, I had no mechanism to steer.

Unfortunately we got a late start. Using my dinghy and outboard as a tugboat, he was able to get my boat away from the club’s transient dock easily enough, but the wind had begun to build, and with my boat’s relatively high freeboard, there was too much wind to move my boat where she needed to be, even with a second dinghy with small motor helping.

Since I lived on the boat, my friend said, “No problem! Just put your anchor down, and spend the night out here. In the morning I’ll come back and we’ll get that rudder in.”

That made more sense than trying to steer my boat back to the transient dock when we already knew the wind was a significant problem, so I put the hook down. I put out an 8:1 rode, including 30 feet of chain, and marked the location on the GPS. I checked the GPS several times throughout the afternoon and into the evening, and the anchor seemed well set. The boat hadn’t moved.

But here was the problem: normally I would have checked the weather before anchoring out. I should have done it this time: the wind was building because a front was on the way.

By the next morning, that front had arrived, and was forming squalls so fast that a weather report 15 minutes old was too old. I used my cell phone and could see that the squall over me was going to move away quickly, but I could also see that other squalls were popping up all over the place, and that this one would probably not be the only one. With an engine but no steering, I really had no choice but to stay where I was.

According to the chart plotter, I had already dragged about 100 feet. Fortunately the boat had stopped spinning and pointed back into the wind again. However, all I had to do was look at the shore around me to see that I was still dragging. Then I would feel the boat lurch as the anchor re-set itself. “Oh, good,” I thought … but then she would drag again. Meanwhile there was the mystery: why had the boat been spinning when I woke up?

I dragged about 500 feet during the fifteen-minute squall, stopping temporarily and moving again. Although the bay has a number of anchored boats, fortunately I wasn’t in their paths. Also fortunately, my boat had so far avoided the nearby shallows. When that storm had passed, I called my friend and told him what was going on. He said he would come right out.

There was only one thing we could realistically do, and that was to let out more rode. With no boats nearby, we let out about 50’ more feet of rode, right before the next squall hit. At least I wasn’t alone this time, and letting out more rode helped: we only dragged about 100 feet this time, but any more drag and I would be in shallow water for the next squall. I called EC-SAR (Eckard College Search and Rescue) and told them my predicament, and they came right away.

The solution was easy: they would hip-tow me to the club’s transient dock, not far away at all. They tied two of their giant, round fenders to my boat, and were 90% done tying us up together when they got another radio call.

“No time to explain!” they said as they rapidly untied my boat. “But we will be back for you!” They raced off to the southwest toward the bridges leading to Tampa Bay, leaving their fenders on my boat.

The next squall wasn’t as fierce, and the boat didn’t drag. About 90 minutes after EC-SAR had left, they came back, tied our boats together, helped me raise the anchor, and brought me back to the transient dock. What had called them away? Someone had seen a man floating in the water, obviously alive but passing toward the Gulf under the Skyway Bridge. The fisherman had waded just a little too far out into the water while fishing on the east side of the Skyway Bridge, got caught in a current, and ended up being swept out of Tampa Bay into the Gulf. EC-SAR went out to the mouth of Tampa Bay, rapidly found the man, and evaluated his medical condition. The man declined further medical help, so they brought him back to his fishing companion (who had not noticed that he was missing), and returned to rescue my boat.

Afterwards, several knowledgeable people and I put our heads together. The only conclusion we could come up with was that a waterspout must have been forming over my boat, causing it to spin. Spinning several times fouled the claw anchor by wrapping chain around the shank. It would loosen, drag, and catch, but eventually release again because it was still fouled.

LESSON LEARNED: Always have a second anchor ready to deploy. I had just lost my spare anchor and had not replaced it yet. Although I hadn’t determined the reason why, I knew my primary anchor wasn’t holding. If I had had a second anchor ready to put out, as my boat dragged the second one would have set. It might have been enough to stop the boat, or at least significantly slow it. I was just lucky that I was so close to good help when all this happened.

Have at least two anchors, and have them both ready to go to work.

I’m going to divide my anchor locker to make deployment of both anchors easier.

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