The Wet Dog Shakes
After 6 weeks of one anchorage as our home base, we’ve joined friends behind a couple small islands - and honestly, we don’t really know what they’re called. Google maps, nautical charts & apps, cruising guidebooks, and the native people all seem to have different names for islands.
Our friends with roomy catamarans generously host “sun-downers” sometimes, but someone suggested a “beach day” on a tiny island just a mile northwest of our anchorage.
We had a potluck-style lunch, and then most of us went to snorkel the surrounding reef.
Left to right: Rolf & Bev from Rochambeau, Mark from Serenity, Ben & Muranda from Fickle, Kathryn from Serenity, Shawn P from Miette, Shawn W from Kismet, and Eric P from Miette. Photo by Shari from Kismet.
Though our days anchored in the Holandes Cays were uneventful, we weren’t near a beach. We made a roundtrip of 20 miles to another group of islands to pick-up a paddleboard to replace Shawn’s inflatable, which was requiring continual patching. The paddleboard does wonders to keep Shawn from getting stir-crazy in the boat.
We sailed south to Esnasdup a couple weeks ago, anchored among friends. However, we would learn the hard way that the holding was not great.
We’d gone to bed around 9:30pm, and a few hours later, closed the hatch due to rain. At 3am, I felt Miette lurch and shudder, and I woke up with a start, my heart racing. I hopped out of bed, looked at our GPS position, and saw that we were 150 feet from where we should be. The anchor was dragging!
“Shawn! Get up! We’re dragging!” In a split second, Shawn was awake and ready. “Get ready for engine start!” I barked, and Shawn got busy with her checklist, while I tossed some laptops between the bed and the hull, in case we were heading out to sea, not wanting them to get launched onto the floor.
The anchorage was not only full of boats, but there were a maze of shallow reefs to contend with, and the night was pitch black.
I climbed out into the cockpit and began turning on instruments. The wind was howling at 30 knots and gusting higher, blowing the cold rain sideways into the cockpit. Shawn read my mind and threw me a foul-weather jacket, calling out “engine ready for start!”.
My glasses, showered by rain, were useless - I couldn’t see anything. I turned the key and Miette’s diesel came to life. I didn’t have time to give it the customary few minutes to warm up, and put it in gear and gave it throttle, if not to bring us forward towards the dragging anchor, but to keep us from going any further backwards.
“Shawn, grab a spotlight and a radio and go to the bow, you’re going to be my eyes! I’ll navigate by GPS but I can’t see any of the boats around us!”. We were having to yell through the squall.
With the anchor retrieved, I turned hard to port and was startled to see a neighboring sailboat far too close for comfort. I put Miette in neutral and let the wind blow the boat over, then back in forward, began following our tracks back out of the tight anchorage.
I was consulting my mental picture of where other boats had been anchored and radioed Shawn, “there should be 2-3 boats right off the bow. We’ll have to pass closely behind them, since there are reefs to port”
Shawn double-clicked the microphone as I’d taught her, to quickly acknowledge something.
Here we are, I thought, 8 degrees north of the equator, and I’m shivering, soaking wet.
I pick a spot on the map where there is a shoal of 10 ft depth marked, and we wind our way through unseen reefs, only to find the map is wrong. The depth is almost 60 feet, far too deep to anchor. For every 1 foot of depth, we need 5 to 6 feet of chain laid out, otherwise we’d drag the anchor.
I’d seen a patch of 30 ft on sonar, and in a spot far enough from a reef, even though trust in my map was now shaken. I radio Shawn to tell her, but in the darkness, I’m not sure if she even knows that we’ve made a couple circles and figure-eights.
“Depth, three-zero!” I yell into the mic. “Prepare to drop!”. She double-keys, and readies the anchor. A few seconds later, she calls back “Ready!”
Miette shows a speed of zero as the chain is fed out of the locker.
“We’re on the bottom!” yells Shawn, who has been counting marks on the chain that tell her how much has come out. I stop paying out chain until I see that Miette is now drifting backwards, blown by the wind, and then little by little, ease out 10 ft at a time until we have 150 feet out. Shawn snubs the anchor, and I back down at full RPM to make sure it’s dug in. We don’t budge.
“OK, you can come on back!” I radio. I gave her a tired high-five. This isn’t the first time we’ve had to re-anchor at night, in a storm - and probably not the last. By now, we know that keeping calm and acting quickly are absolutely critical in emergencies.
We shut off the engine, go down below and dry off. I sit and rest, watching our GPS position to make sure Miette doesn’t move. Shawn stares blankly at me.
“You can go back to sleep. I’ll watch the boat,” I reassure. She does, and after an hour, the storm has passed and we haven’t budged an inch. I listen as Miette rocks gently as wavelets lap against the hull and adrenaline fades away into exhaustion.
As the eastern horizon begins to lighten, it’s time for me to get a little more sleep, too.
The next day is bright and beautiful, and the previous night seemed like it was just a bad dream.
We’re a little closer to the Kuna settlements, so we’re seeing veggie boats much more often, and rarely pass up an opportunity to buy perishables.
This one was particularly well-stocked!
One afternoon, Shawn paddled over to join folks in a little divot in the reef called “the jacuzzi”. Every nice day, a group of sailors will dinghy over at 4pm to get a little social time. There’s room there for a dozen people to either stand in the sand, or tread water in the middle. On her way, she saw a dog on the uninhabited island in front of us, which tried to swim out to her, but turned around when it reached deep water.
The next morning, we rose to the sounds of the dog howling. Any time we would go on deck, it would appear out of the bushes, looking at us. Though we were now quite a way from the shore, I took a photo and posted it to 3 different WhatsApp groups, asking if someone lost a dog. Nobody did, so it was probably abandoned on the island.
I took the dinghy to the island, carrying water for the dog, and was met by a Spanish couple who’d seen my post, and come by dinghy from an anchorage a few miles away to rescue the dog - at least until someone claimed or adopted it. The Spaniard told me that when he approached the dog, it ran off - so maybe it was afraid of men.
The woman got off their dinghy and walked the north side of the island, where it is too shallow to dinghy, and the man and I patrolled the south side.
We found the dog on the sandy, eastern-most point of the island. By then, Shawn and our friend Susan had come out, too, and there were three women on the island and me and the Spaniard in our dinghies, just off the point.
The 5 of us managed to corral the dog. It had started swimming, but was so tired, the Spaniard had no problem reaching over and lifting it out of the water by the scruff.
He looked at me and said the dog was trembling. His partner swam out to the dinghy and got aboard. They let the dinghy drift a little while, soothing the dog, and offering it some cat food and water that Susan had brought. Within a few minutes, they were motoring off, and later posted a photo of the dog aboard their boat.
We are still hatching plans, but not in a hurry to leave San Blas yet. Enjoy a couple short videos of our recent adventures.