Learning to Anchor

This weekend was our first alone on the boat for a while.  Vicky's parents flew back to Guangzhou on Friday morning and we spent some time this weekend recovering from the month-long visit.  Saturday afternoon, we turned our attention back to sailing and decided to just take the launch out and... have lunch (well, dinner, actually by the time we got organized).  Vicky wanted to do a little cleaning (it's her hobby... really... she's getting a reputation around the club), and I wanted to work at understanding more about the systems on board (something you can't do while entertaining).

So we worked at our tasks for a couple of hours, then had dinner as we watched the sun set.  Dinner was Tomatoes and Berries from McCormack Farms (along with some other ingredients).

Believe it or not, I finally figured out how to get the chart plotter to display the clock time, and made some progress at understanding the autopilot.

Sunday, we set out to try our hand at anchoring.  Anchoring is covered in the ASA 103 course, but we never actually anchored... so I guess it was anchoring theory.  Seas The Day came with an anchor as part of the "USCG Safety Kit" the dealer included, but other than verifying that it was present, I never looked into what all was included.  On Saturday I had verified that we had a Delta 22lb anchor attached to 8' of chain and 112' of line.  It should allow us to anchor in 5' to 15' of water, but really only as a "lunch hook" (meaning someone is out in the cockpit watching things) as opposed to holding the ship firm during a hurricane.

So we motored out of the harbor and found a place that looked OK, then started the windlass to drop the anchor.  It turned out the line was just thrown in the locker when installed and a bit tangled so we had some tense minutes as we drifted and untangled the line.  Eventually, it held!  (Sorry for the focusing problems.)

So we then set a way point and sat around for an hour or so to see if she would drift (she didn't).  And thus we discovered how great it is to just lie around out in a boat for a while at anchor.  This could get addicting!

Eventually we weighed anchor (pulled it in) and sailed for a little.

But... the wind was picking up and the water was getting choppy so we called it a day and motored back in.
I realized that I was emotionally unsettled for some reason and finally realized that I had a dark cloud hanging over me - literally.

Oh, one final note, on the launch heading back to the dock, we met Brandon and Tina (another Chinese-American couple) and their family.  They also are new members of KYC... I had interacted with Brandon on the dock committee a couple of times and I was glad that Vicky finally got to meet them.