Even though we had a smooth and easy passage to Trinidad, we're still short of sleep, so we turn in relatively early hoping to catch up. But at two a.m., we're woken up by a soft thump against our hull, then another. It sounds like a mooring ball has drifted back with the wind or current to bump our hull, a common and annoying occurence on moorings. Our sleep-befuddled brains take a moment to remember -- we're not on a mooring. The next thump has us both out of bed, racing for the companionway stark naked.
When we look out, we know we're not going to catch up on our sleep tonight. We've fetched up against a moored barge with alongside tug; the tug is a few yards directly in front of us, and the side of the barge overlaps with the first six feet of Windom's starboard side. Our anchor chain stretches forward and disappears under the barge. Fortunately there's no wind, so we bob there on the current, gently bumping our rub rail and bow pulpit against the barge. How did we get ourselves into this mess?
Chaguaramas, the main yachting port (and required Customs and Immigration stop), is an industrial harbor, crowded with workboats, tugs, barges, and even fairly sizeable ships, in addition to lots of yachts. Filthy with oil, trash, and bits of organic debris, the current sweeps through at an impressive clip, reversing every six hours, swirling unpredictably among the boats. In addition, the bottom's hard and tough to get a good anchor set in, and the water's quite deep -- the shallowest part of the anchorage that we found was over 30 feet, and many boats are anchored in 60 feet -- so everyone's got a lot of anchor rode out, and everyone's got a big swinging radius. Ordinarily, boats in an anchorage lie to the wind, and shift more or less in unison. But here it's not uncommon that one boat gets caught by the current and swings around, while another of less draft, greater windage, or just far enough away from the first boat that the current hasn't gotten to it yet, remains pointing in a different direction. And if their swinging circles overlap -- bang!
There's probably a lot of junk on the bottom, too, and with all that anchor chain out, it's easy to get wrapped around something. That might have been what did us in; if our chain had gotten around something, then when we moved with the current we wouldn't swing as far as we should have, leaving us too close to the barge. Or possibly the barge, with its deeper draft, swung first on the current shift and grabbed our chain somehow. We might just have been within the barge's swinging radius, even though when we anchored we had thought we were far enough away. (In fact we'd seen another sailboat anchored literally feet from the barge, when we first arrived and cruised the anchorage, and marveled at the idiocy of anyone ending up in that position. Of course, they were farther away than we were at 2 a.m.!)
So what could we do? We couldn't raise our anchor, because it was somewhere under the barge. Instead we let out our entire 300 feet of chain and 50 feet of line, and motored backwards, dropping our second anchor once we were clear, and letting out a normal amount of scope on that. We checked the tide table and determined that the current would shift around 4:15 a.m., so we set an alarm for 4:30 and got up to check that we were positioned clear of everyone else.
We couldn't sleep in, of course. In the morning we had to retrieve our primary anchor, and what a chore that was! First we had to pull up our secondary anchor, which turned out to be badly fouled with the chain from the primary. After wrestling with it for a while, using another line and a boathook to take the pressure off the chain, we were able to free the anchor and bring it in. The primary chain was a mass of kinks and knots because we had never spooled out the whole length of it before. Eventually we got the whole shebang back on deck and went looking for another spot to anchor.
We couldn't get the hook to grab very well in the first spot we tried, but we hadn't had breakfast yet and my teeny stomach was growling, so we left it down for a food break. We hadn't finished our cereal when some friends dinked by for a visit, and we chatted with them for a while. Suddenly the sky grew very, very dark. Our friends raced back to their boat, and we closed the hatches and waited for the rain.
Not only did it rain, it blew. We measured 32 knots on our instruments; amazingly enough, we didn't get blown across the harbor, although we saw three boats drag and heard VHF warnings about others. But we weren't happy with our set, so when the weather cleared twenty minutes later we found a new spot (which we suspect opened up when the boat originally there dragged away...) But our CQR dug in well, and hopefully we won't have to move for a while!
After reading our first log upon returning to the boat (9/21/01), some friends emailed us this quote (which we later saw on a Latitudes and Attitudes bumper sticker): "Attitude is the difference between ordeal and adventure." I guess we temporarily lost the "adventure" attitude somewhere in the US while we were off the boat. But thinking back on the events of that night, I guess we've regained it, because it was really no big deal -- not fun, but we did what had to be done and thought no more of it. (Although I did have a real whomper of a nightmare when I fell back asleep, dreaming that we slammed back against the barge and it sheared off our whole bow pulpit. When I told Britt, he laughed and said, "Well, it wouldn't be too disastrous -- there are lots of welders here." Attitude!)
I remember when we were just planning our cruising life, reading other people's web pages about their adventures and ordeals. It seemed to us that they made lots of mistakes that, naturally, we would avoid because we would be of course much better prepared. We would have a newer boat and equipment, we wouldn't go right out into the ocean first thing, we would learn stuff and practice things and so on and so forth. We'd never get caught out in bad weather, we'd never drag anchor or fall overboard, we'd never get cockroaches on the boat, we'd never have to hand-steer for three days. Well, the best-laid plans, and all that, you know. We didn't get roaches (yet!) but we got ants; we didn't drag across the harbor, but we swung into a barge. Shit happens, it happens to everyone, and if you're going to go cruising, it's going to happen to you. Learning from others' mistakes and buying good gear certainly helps minimize the consequences. But the thing you need most is a whole bunch of positive attitude.