A sailboat had broken free from it's mooring and drifted over to visit our neighbor's house. I zoomed in to get the name of the boat and called Sherri (the KYC Fleet Captain), who in turn called Bill (the owner). I'm pretty sure he broke some speed records getting to Keyport.
A bit about our moorings... under the "balls" out in the harbor, lie a complex system designed to hold the ships in place, but still allow for a fair bit of movement as tides, winds, currents and yes, storms have their way. The diagram below is borrowed from Chapman: Piloting and Seamanship (more on that another day). On the seafloor lies a mushroom anchor, a several hundred pound hunk of iron shaped like a mushroom (which unlike the diagram, usually lies on its side and digs into the bottom). Attached to that is some heavy chain and some lighter chain. Here at KYC, attached to the top of the light chain are two pendants (ropes with eye's in them) that get attached to a boat. If done right, the light chain is the depth of the water at highest tide and only extreme wind, storms, etc., can lift the heavy chain and if all else fails, the anchor can drag slowly along the bottom.
By and large, the system works. During the recent Hurricane Sandy, the four boats left out at their moorings all survived with very little damage (as opposed to hundreds of boats that were destroyed on land). But the system isn't perfect (nothing is) and we all know that iron, steel and salt water aren't exactly friendly with each other. Evidently Bill's mooring failed at the top of the mushroom anchor.
And now his boat was awfully close to the rocks under that little patch of grass sticking out into the bay. So what do you do in this situation?
You get a GOOD friend (John in this case) and you clear off the old mooring chains. Then you take your anchor & line and set it out as far as it will go and pull it hard to set anchor...
Then you wait out low tide...
And once high tide approaches, you head back on board, and wait for it to float. Once free, you motor out...
Retrieve the anchor...
And find a friend's mooring ball (hopefully one without problems) to tie off. Then you head back to the KYC bar and receive congratulations on saving your boat from something like this with no damage!
Watching all this was an incredible learning experience. When I first saw it, I sort of assumed that cranes would be involved... some sort of complicated recovery. It was really neat to see a master assess the situation, stabilize his boat, and then simply wait for the right time to act.
One interesting tidbit... Bill is the next Fleet Captain for KYC (the person who manages the anchorage and sets standards for mooring equipment for the harbor). I suspect we might hear a little more about moorings over the winter.
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