N39 26.399 W81 26.294 to N30 00.054 W81 20.184
One of the plantation houses showing the seawall and sea grass
Wow! Did I mention? WOW!?! The winds came ripping though here last night. A little after the tidal current changes at 10:30pm the winds made their presence with vengeance. I could feel the boat swing around. At 11:30 “Anchors Awaaay my boys…” started playing and we went up to look about. We had swung about as expected and had moved 88 M. according to the chart plotter. We appeared to be holding so I went back to the V-berth (bed) and Wayne sat up for an hour to make sure we were still stationary. With the winds plus the current working in tandem, that may have stretched the anchor chains to their maximum limit. Wayne turned on the wind generator to make sure we had power to start the boat if needed then came back to bed and we both laid there listening to the wind generator howling at us. The wind was really ripping through here, but the anchors seemed to be holding.
The next challenge would come when the tide changed again flooding back into the river. Then we’d have winds and currents working against each other. The next tide change was expected to be around 4:10am and sure enough we could hear the chain and the nylon rode from the other anchor scraping along the bottom of the boat. Wayne got anchor watch, and I got Wayne watch because I basically couldn’t sleep with all the noise of the wind generator and the swinging of the boat as it fought current in one direction with strong winds from the top. I took over watch at 6:15am and Wayne went below to sleep. While on watch I’d decided that even though this was a pretty anchorage, I couldn’t handle 3 early mornings in a row. I watched as one of the boats at anchor decided that they’d had enough and left before light. The other boat from MI was on a sandbar on it’s side (it later was righted as the tide came in but the wind had carried it to shore). At 7:30 I went below to ask Wayne how he felt about upping anchor after I let him sleep for another hour? He said I’m just trying to sleep. We’ll see. I grabbed my books and chart and went back up and noticed we were swinging pretty close to the plantation seawall and raced back down the hatch to turn on the depth sounder. Wayne asked for the army blanket that he’d been using during his watch so I threw it at him and flicked on the depth sounder and raced back up to see we had 6.5ft and I was still closing on the mud and seawall to the plantation. Engine on. Wind generator off. Wayne up and dressed while I kept us in the middle of the channel. We needed to hoist the anchors since it looked like we were dragging into the shallows. The secondary anchor was giving Wayne a problem coming up. We soon discovered that the chain was tangled in a huge knot. Okay not just ITs chain, but the chain of our primary anchor too. It looked like a big metal ball of chain yarn wrapped around the anchor. It reminded me of a cross-wrapped in chain so a large X formed over and under the cross part. Several times. Then it was knotted and draped with the remaining knotted mess. All pulled snug by the currents. Even the pelican sitting in the rain seemed to be saying "What the heck did you guys do to those anchors?!?
We puzzled over how to get it up since it was wrapped in the primary chain also. Using the snubber to the primary anchor and our mighty pole we were able to hoist the mess up to the side of the boat to try and unknot the anchor from the two anchor chains (without getting dings in the gelcoat side of the boat). My fingers got tangled in the mess and the current decided to tighten the chain tighter around my fingers and hand causing me to scream. I finally was able to tell Wayne what was going on and that he needed to pull up on the chain so I could get my hand out. We then got some of the knots and loops undone then Neptune decided that he realllly wanted our pole. We watched as it went upstream with the current. The good news is that it’s supposed to float. Yep it floats. Unfortunately the current is floating it past the boat at about 2 knots to fast. Goodbye pole. We finally got the 2ndary anchor on deck and the chain straightened out and I went back to the helm while Wayne worked on stowing the anchor. 10 minutes later Wayne’s cap decided to join the pole and jumped ship. I watched it float past me going up river to join the pole in some watery pole cap paradise. 10 minutes more passed and Wayne turned to me to give me “that look”. Somehow the primary anchor chain had knotted itself into little bows. Neptune gift-wrapped it in two places. I could mentally hear Wayne swearing as he worked out those knots, and we finally were able to pull up anchor and head out somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00am. I’m not sure of the time since this was an unplanned, early departure that turned out to be a later departure. I never really got to go over the coordinates of exactly where we were heading today but had a general sense of where since we’d anchored there before. I recalled it being a nice spot with lots of room and only requiring one anchor. I sat at the helm thinking about the mornings events and wishing I’d had a picture of the anchor all decked out in its chain wrapping and draped and tied up with the other anchors chain. Such is life. I’m sure we had been the fishermen’s entertainment of the morning as I waved goodbye to them.
We traveled past two dredgers, one Swing Bridge and across a busy St John’s River full of freighters and entered the Tolomato River anchorage about 2:30pm. We’d made good time - had the currents with us and were consistently running 6-7 knots. We had an early dinner of flat iron steak (fried – no grill remember?) with garlic mashed potatoes. My body feels like it’s been hit by a Mack Truck and is definitely ready for the sack. Wayne looks like death warmed over. No sleep, flushed and red eyed.
I polished off the rest of Glenn Beck’s book “The Christmas Sweater” and have to find some tissue before lights out at 6pm. Sniffle, sniffle… It’s going to be a hard Christmas. I shouldn’t have read this one. I miss you mom – especially at Christmas time. You always made it a special time of the year. You made Christmas…
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