Day 39 – N 37° 58.652’ W 75° 51.405’ Crisfield, MD

After such a speedy sail up to Crisfield, we spent a terrible night at anchor.  The wind never settled down for the evening as it usually does, rather, it kept blowing 20 knots with gusts over 30 knots.  We had anchored in the small basin and it is well protected from waves, but not the wind.  When we set the anchor the wind was strong, too, but the gusts were not as strong or as frequent as they became later.  As is our habit when we anchor, we set an anchor alarm on our GPS – it should let us know if we moved more than 240 feet from where we set it, indicating that the anchor was dragging.  And from 15:00 until 21:30 when we went to bed, the anchor was holding steady as we expected it to do.  We really didn’t know anything about the bottom, whether it was supposed to be good holding, and none of our cruising guides that recommended this anchorage mentioned anything special about this particular harbor.  So we made preparations to react quickly in the event of trouble (like laying out the warm clothes we would need if we suddenly had to get up reset the anchor), and went to bed. 

At about 23:00 our anchor alarm beeped, but there was no message indicating the reason for the beep, and looking around in the dark, everything seemed OK.  Back to bed until 01:30 when we heard the thump of the hull contacting a solid object.  We bolted up, quickly threw on some clothes and went outside to see that we had dragged our anchor completely across the harbor and backed into an empty slip, and the thump was our hull bumping against a workboat in the next slip.  The wind was still howling from the south, and Lyn put out a rubber fender between our boats while Peter started the engine.  After a quick conference on strategy, we agreed that Lyn would operate the anchor windlass and Peter would pilot the boat, and we would keep each other informed via the radio headsets we use for anchoring.  Lyn got the anchor back aboard and Peter kept Kite out of further harm in the strong wind, and then we went back to re-set the anchor near the original location.

We had noted, from the residue on the chain and anchor, that the bottom consisted of hard mud – clay actually – something very difficult to set an anchor into because the anchor cannot easily dig very deep into it.  So this time, after dropping the anchor and letting wind push Kite back until the anchor chain was taut, Peter tried to set the anchor deeper by backing down hard with the engine.  It dragged for a little distance then apparently caught.  So Peter decided that we would have to set an “anchor watch” in which one person stays on deck and frequently checks the position of the boat against objects on the shoreline and background in order to detect movement of the boat.  Peter took the first watch, to be from 01:30 to 04:00, and then Lyn would take the next one until daybreak.  About 02:00 the wind suddenly died down for about 5 minutes, and also shifted from southerly to northerly in that same 5 minutes.  Then it picked up again to the same or higher intensity as before.  It wasn’t long before the anchor, carefully set against a southerly wind but not a northerly wind, started dragging again, and we had to react quickly because this time we were blowing onto the rocky shore.  We re-set the anchor once again, and after an hour or so, it again started dragging.  So once more around 05:00 we re-set, but this time more into the middle of the harbor.  We thought the Coast Guard wouldn’t like how close we were to their path out of the harbor, but our safety comes before their convenience.  This time the anchor finally held.  We decided to contact the marina when they opened and spend the next 2 days tied up alongside a dock, rather than deal with that fire drill every time the wind did a major shift.  Finally, at 08:00 the marina staff arrived and we pulled up the anchor for the last time and motored over to the marina.  After getting safely tied to the dock, Peter took a nap until noon.  Lyn went to a local hospital for a routine blood test that her doctor asks for every month, then returned and took a short nap too.

In the afternoon, we checked on our mail (hadn’t been delivered to the Post Office yet) and the local museum (was closed until summer season) and a cruise boat to Tangier Island (wasn’t running until May 15^th).  The good news was that we are tied up at a marina dock for the night and they only charged us $1/foot.  In celebration of the successes of the day we walked to a pizzeria and ordered a pizza for dinner.