Did you see the picture of the tangled anchor chain in our last post? MORE anchor drama follows:
This story is a little circular so bear with me and read on. Everything that happens has consequences. We’ve had a string of electronic failures recently; the anchor light at the top of the mast is out, one of our chart plotter displays died suddenly (Raymarine you’re on my list!), then our Samsung Galaxy Tablet battery got so hot the battery expanded and popped the glass screen off. Expanding lithium batteries are dangerous and it’s easy to find stories of boat fires from lithium battery failures. So the tablet battery is in the trash and we are on the hunt for a new battery. We use the tablet as a back-up for the navigation displays and run a program called Navionics on it. Basically, it’s another chart plotter. A chart plotter is what we use instead of paper charts. There’s all kinds of information on the navigation chart and (this is important!) sometimes there’s information on the tablet that isn’t on my installed boat displays (chart plotters).
Without having the tablet to use for extra information, we set anchor in La Cruz in what looked like a perfect anchoring spot. We left the boat there for a couple weeks and tried to deal with the failed electronic systems. We have friends on S/V Felicita who were traveling back to the US so they have kindly (thanks Gretchen!) agreed to take the chart plotter back and ship it to Raymarine and bring back a new anchor light.
This is good progress – it looks like we have everything getting fixed at some level and sometime later we can have Amazon ship us a new tablet once we have a Mexican address to ship it to.
This morning we attempted to raise the anchor with the windless so we could leave La Cruz and the anchor would NOT pull up. (A windless is a mechanical device on the foredeck that grasps the anchor chain, pulls it out of the water, and deposits the chain in the anchor locker at the bow of the boat).
Grinding noises and sounds like we were going to break something big (and probably expensive) were coming from the connection to the anchor chain. Clearly it is stuck on something. Now you may imagine that our anchor is important to us. We’re attached to it (pun intended). It keeps us off the rocks. When there’s no marina, we are ‘on the hook’. We can’t stop in a bay without an anchor. An unrecoverable anchor will mean weeks of pain trying to get one shipped internationally or thousands of dollars, probably both.
I and another cruiser used snorkel gear to dive down the anchor chain to discover that our chain and anchor was firmly wedged in some rocks and wrapped around an old sunken boat 25 feet below us. We could not free it. We called on the VHF radio for assistance from the cruising community. We asked to borrow scuba tanks or if anyone knew of any divers in the area. (Note to self: add dive equipment to the list or build a hookah setup).
A fellow cruiser who heard our call referred some Mexican divers to us who had a hookah setup (a hookah is an air compressor connected to a scuba regulator with about 25′ of hose). They came out in an inflatable boat with an air compressor and using an extension cord out the side of Island Summers we fired it up and placed it in the bottom of their little boat. At one point on this journey we were all getting shocked by salt water soaked plugs on the extension cord and the air compressor sitting in the bottom of a wet inflatable boat. Eventually we managed to free the anchor and get on our way. Oh my gosh what a relief!
Once we were free and on our way I took a careful look at the Navionics software which is loaded on my phone too and realized we’d anchored directly over a marked hazard on the charts and succeeded in getting our anchor very tangled up. The entry about the wreck and tangling hazard had been updated only two weeks ago. Probably within a day of us dropping anchor in the same spot. See what I mean about everything has consequences. The broken tablet caused us to miss important information. Luckily we were near a strong cruiser community and received excellent help. I’m constantly amazed by the grace, kindness and resourcefulness of both the cruising community and the Mexican workers that support it. Now onward to Punta Mita.
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