Marigot Bay - Anchoring Practice

Serafina
Rob & Sarah Bell
Mon 2 Jan 2012 00:27

13:58.05N 61:01.76W

 

Sat and Sunday, 31st Dec and 1st Jan

 

Following discussions with one or two other boats with Hydrovane Self Steering systems fitted, we decided to make some checks on our set up and fine tune its settings. We did find that it was not quite set up correctly and we are now very much looking forward to trying it out again to see if we have made this excellent system perform a bit better still. All in all though, we kept ourselves amused through to dinner time on New Year’s Eve, then following a few phone calls to friends and family we headed round to Halsway Grace for pre-dinner drinks and then on to the Ocean Club, which is one of the restaurants in the marina complex.

 

We had a great evening and enjoyed some good food and wonderful company. At midnight we walked out onto the poolside area and watched a very spectacular fireworks display  down on the beach, with other big displays following it rather further away.

 

Earlier in the day we had introduced ourselves to the owner of Weir Kraken which is another Najad 570. He keeps his boat out here and in the USA with a professional crew on board all the time. Sadly he only gets a very short amount of time himself on board and so he was being very stoic about the fact that something serious had failed with the hydraulic outhaul inside the boom and his boat was partly in bits as they struggled to fix it in time for his week’s holiday. The good news was that they got it all done by late morning and he and his family set off for their planned trip down to Bequia for the evening celebrations. 70 miles and around 6 hours of daylight.

 

On Sunday as planned, we settled up with the marina office and said all our goodbyes and by 10.30 were sailing out of Rodney Bay with a brisk 15-20 knots of wind more or less behind us.

 

At 6, 7 and even briefly 8 knots, we were soon approaching the narrow entrance to Marigot Bay and had just got our sails down when a very violent rain storm swept through with 25 plus knots of wind driving it hard at us.

 

We elected to drop anchor to one side of the entrance channel  having agreed not to take one of the available (but expensive) mooring buoys. This went well and we settled down for the afternoon with more bouts of rain followed by blistering sunshine. At 3.00pm one of the boats ahead of us left and we chose to move into their space as it was a bit further out of the channel and closer to the inner bay and so a bit less rolly. This seemed to go well and we sat back in our new position feeling fairly smug. This was the point at which the strongest winds and rain storm of the day swept through Marigot and at its height (around 30 plus knots) our anchor broke out and we dragged a short distance. So once the rain had moved on, we raised the anchor and re-positioned ourselves, but this time we got it wrong and ended up too close to a French catamaran that was on a fixed buoy. So un-daunted we tried again. This time we failed to get the anchor to set, so we went through the whole process again – and again before we were finally confident that we had a reasonable holding. But our confidence on the quality of the holding here has been seriously dented and so we will re-consider our options tomorrow morning! What made all this slightly worse was that the boat that arrived just before the big storm which dropped its anchor almost exactly where we had been before, had no trouble at all………

 

Anyway as we go to press (8.30pm) a large catamaran has just eased its way between us and the nearest boat (showing the wrong lights and with their night-sight compromised by a bright cockpit light) and dropped its anchor and very little chain just upwind of us, so it time to start hoping the wind does not get up tonight.