The day began windy and squally, resembling the prior 24 hours. I watched the other boats in the anchorage while David slept during the congruent wind tide cycle. At the end of this cycle we decided to re-anchor as several boats had come in near us and several others had left our old spot. We managed this fairly easily and found ourselves next to an old steel boat, Tumbleweed, that had behaved well the night before.
We spent a lot of time thinking about the balances in anchoring and how each boat is different in the balance between wind, current and anchor. What we have learned about Josie is that she is our fat bottomed girl with a full keel and wide beam, so like most boats with any keel, she will float with current when current is strong. She also has a lot of wind resistance on her topside: furled sail, mast, our cockpit enclosure, our dinghy on the deck. The problem comes when a strong wind is opposite the current. The wind is not strong enough to turn her into the wind with the force of current on the keel so she tends to ride up a bit on her anchor from the force of the wind. She does not do this fast and is well held by the anchor and chain but she does inch forward a bit.
The catamaran either has fin keels or daggerboards. It has less on the bottom and more on top and while it floats with the current in light winds, that feature can be suddenly overcome in strong winds causing the sailing dance we witnessed last night. We read about cat boats using drogues to balance this effect at anchor and thought it might be helpful for us too.
A drogue is basically a drag device that you put off the stern. A drift sock from the fishing/canoeing world would be a type of drogue. When we tow our dinghy, we often put a dishtowel to drag between a line on each side of the stern. It keeps just enough drag so she does not surf waves. There is a lot of confusion between drogues and sea anchors. I think that is because they make parachute forms of both and that sometimes drogues are used to help anchor. Drogues are also sometimes used to slow the boat or balance it in large waves from behind. A sea anchor is a large parachute that is deployed off the bow to basically stop or slow the boat in rough seas or where it is too deep to anchor. The size is based on boat length and displacement. Ours would take a 9 foot parachute.
We have a small drogue that came with our boat. We decided to try it in yesterday’s opposing wind current situation and it seemed to help. Once the wind dropped, the balance of our boat favored current and we did not need it.
We spent the day on the boat watching boats go by. There were coast guard vessels with large guns mounted on the bow. A beautiful wooden schooner, Russamee, anchored next to us. We met her owners Laci and Mike as they were going ashore in their dinghy Tipsy. We had admired Tipsy at the dinghy dock in St. Augustine. They are traveling on a trip to bring supplies to a town in Haiti. They need to dock the boat to load supplies. We saw one brave vessel daring to sail yesterday!
The wind dropped in the evening and it became quite calm. All of the boats were behaving, even the cats. We opted for dinner on the boat followed by at least a six hour stretch of sleep. Tomorrow we try to work out our starter situation so that we can be on the move once again.
Calm in the anchorage