Sunday 6^th September – Órmos Sívota, Levkas

38:37.311N 20:41.046E

Early this morning we noticed Sarah buying something in a bag from a guy in a van nearby; the van man turned out to be the bread man so we were able to get fresh bread – I guess we hadn’t been up early enough to spot him the previous morning.

Late morning we rigged the outboard on the dinghy and went for a run around the bay looking for a good snorkelling area.  Unfortunately the wind was getting up by now and it was getting a bit choppy out round the corner in the entrance to the bay.  We realised that it would be better to go from the end of the quay we are on and so came back to Pyxis for lunch and then went off with Sarah and David for a snorkel along the rocks at the end of the quay.

The talk today has been of strong NW winds forecast for tonight and the quays and anchorage have filled up during the day with boats coming in for shelter. 

Late afternoon the wind was filling in and a number of boats were having to re-anchor in the bay as the holding is patchy in places and they were dragging.  We decided to pull ourselves a bit further off the quay and settled down for the evening as the wind started to gust.

However, having just pointed out to a nearby catamaran that it was dragging towards us, we then noticed that we had a problem that then kept us busy for the rest of the day.  After two nights with no problem, and holding solid with 45m of chain out, Richard noticed we had dropped back towards the quay a bit and we were falling down a bit towards Cape.  We tightened up the anchor chain a little on the windlass and found it came running freely into the boat – somehow the anchor had tripped and, with the wind building, this was bad news – it was already too windy to take Pyxis out to reset the anchor and back into our space again safely.

It was time to quickly deploy the kedge anchor; in our case the kedge is actually quite big, being the original Brittany that came as the main anchor on the boat when we got her.  We manoeuvred the anchor chain off the windlass, replaced it with the line for the kedge, and then Richard and David took the kedge out on the dinghy and lowered it into place; Sarah and I then used the windlass to pull it in – luckily it seemed to set hard and pulled us clear again, fingers crossed.

With the immediate crisis over, it was time to take stock.  Having seen our anchor trip, David decided he would feel better if he had his kedge out too as the wind was quite strong and on the beam at the time, pushing us sideways, so Richard and David went off again with Cape’s kedge.

We then decided to try to reset our main anchor given we had been told to expect it to get windier later.  First we had to manoeuvre the line for the kedge off the windlass and onto the front cleat; we used another line back to the genoa winch to take the load and allow us to move it.  We then pulled our main anchor in to find a ball of mud and weed – obviously not in a good patch of ground.  Richard and David got back in the dinghy and I lowered the anchor and 50m of chain into it with them – I thought they would sink but Richard managed to motor out in a straight line as David lowered the chain into the water and they set the anchor offset from the kedge.  We have now pulled it in and it seems to have set with about 35m of chain out. 

Each boat now had two anchors set so hopefully we’d manage the night between us.

After this excitement, we tidied up, showered and fixed dinner.  Cape were able to get on with entertaining their guests who had arrived whilst we were resetting the anchors, a Dutch couple from one of the other boats who have two children that Bethany and Bryn have been playing with all day.  After dinner we joined them all aboard Cape and it became a very late night…

During the evening we could see lightning over the hills to the east of us, but the weather stayed clear of us.  As for the wind, soon after we had reset the anchors it dropped right away and stayed quiet all night.