It was 2 am, of course, when the wind changed from southwest to northwest and picked up. The change woke me, so I went on deck to check out the anchorage, a wide shallow bay off the Intracoastal Waterway in North Carolina. I shone the spotlight across the bay and the other boats there seemed fine.
But, then I saw that the boat that had been safely anchored well off our starboard side was now directly up wind and dragging down on us. There was no one in the cockpit, so I grabbed the air horn and fired off five short blasts. That roused their crew.
By the time their skipper had the engine running and the anchor up, the boat was no more than two boat lengths from us. We were fine and the other boat motored well away to reset their anchor. But, if I hadn’t woken up, the collision would have been a mess. i
It’s the summer cruising season, now, and every harbor and cove is full of cruising boats swinging on their anchors. As we all learn, sooner or later, there are certain protocols amongst sailors for the best way to anchor and the best way to avoid anchoring follies.
First among them is to never anchor too close to another boat and, certainly, never anchor right over another boat’s anchor. This seems so obvious it’s hardly worth mentioning except that every summer we see the rule broken multiple times.
The question then becomes how to handle a situation where you are settled and secure on your hook and another boat anchors in this usually forbidden zone. We’re all a bit different when a situation like this arises. You can ask the skipper of the other boat to move, you can opt to move your own boat or you can ignore the problem.
My usual choice is to take the first route and call out from the bow to the other skipper that he is too close to us and has created an unsafe situation. This almost always causes the other boat to up anchor and find another spot to drop it.
But, if the other skipper won’t move, we’ll solve the problem by moving ourselves and hope to find a nice open spot in the harbor where we can swing freely as the wind direction changes. This one solution is made all the easier if you have a powerful windlass and an all-chain anchor rode.
In our book, it is always better for us to go to sleep feeling safely anchored than to lie awake waiting for a terrible crunch.
