Nice morning adventure

This morning was nice and calm. Cloudy, so not as hot as usual. I was working in the transom compartment, trying to find out why the automatic bilge pump had stopped working, when all of a sudden it was not so calm anymore.
An impressive thunderstorm, with gusts of wind up to 45 knots (23 m/s) hit the bay, blowing straight into it. My anchor started dragging pretty badly. The holding in the soft mud here is not so good. And the distance to the leeward shore was only about 300 meter. So I had to get the anchor out in the strong wind, and get the boat turned around before hitting it!

Getting the anchor up when the boat is heaving and turning like this is not so easy, especially when you are alone. I had quite some pulse going before I managed to get it out. By then the boat was drifting sideways to the shore with several knots of speed. This is one of the points in time where you really don’t want the engine to fail ;-)

Well it didn’t, so I got away and managed to put the anchor out again further out in the bay.

By this time the boat was thoroughly soaked inside, since I hadn’t prioritized closing down the hatches. So there was a bit of drying out work to do.

The good side of this incident was that I had a good test of the redesigned anchor arm, which got quite a beating, but held up well. And after calming down somewhat and getting the hatches closed, I also got a good test of the last days work, which was to get rid of the small annoying leaks the hatches had at some of the mounting screws. This test too came out pretty good. The hatches are much less leaky now.