One Dodgy Anchorage to Another

The day started a hell of a lot earlier than we wanted, at just after midnight in fact…the wind climbed steadily so Russell got paranoid and let out a few more metres of warp on the bow anchor. Turns out that he wasn’t paranoid enough as we all woke up at 2am from a strong gust with the boat heeling at a very weird angle and facing a very weird direction. So Russell got up quickly to assess what the problem was - we had dragged our bow anchor but luckily the stern anchor and line to the island caught us before we drifted into the rocks - hence the weird angle and direction. Now the fun part - transfer the stern anchor to the bow while making sure the line wasn’t around our propeller or keel, same check of the stern line going to the island, then get Angela up to help reset it all. A little bit of trust gained in the engine as she fired right up and we spent the next almost hour resetting everything, this time with our extra length of stupidly heavy chain attached, and way more warp than we ever thought we would need. A good hard tug using the engine proved she was holding very well now and even though we were only a few metres off the rocks on the port side, the stern anchor had a good hold too, so Angela went back to sleep while Russell stayed up till 4am to make sure she was indeed sitting nicely. Ironically, we didn’t get any more large gusts of wind.
Perhaps it was the lack of sleep or perhaps it was just fucking cold, but warming up again took a while!

A long sleep in, after the night we had, felt necessary. Feeling very thankful for our heater and coffee in bed from Russell’s mum.
A slow start, Turkish egg breakfast, and a bumpy but beautiful motor to Meltefjorden - another stunning anchorage! And at least 6 seals curiously watching us from a distance. We had issues again setting the anchor in about 12 metres of depth, so took a punt going into the shallows to anchor - a sinker on a line told us we had half a metre of water under the keel - heaps! We do need to figure out why we can’t get the anchor to set well though…it’s not exactly a heavy yacht. Once we got over the fact that we could see the bottom like we were standing on it, we again appreciated how much of an insane anchorage we had all to ourselves. It still requires some pinching every now and then to believe what we are doing…Read more