As I described in the last post, the anchorage in St. Augustine is challenging. It is the single most difficult aspect of staying here. We have been constantly experiencing nervousness and stress about our boat being on anchor in the strong reversing current. For example, when the wind and the current are opposing each other, it quickly creates a very uncomfortable and nasty chop that makes it very difficult to get an anchor set well. The boats tend to point in the direction of the current instead of the wind, so if the wind is coming strong from a different direction, it hits the boat on the beam which is awkward and very uncomfortable. Every week, based on the upcoming weather conditions, we have been going through a long debate about moving to a different spot to be in the most secure position for whatever front may be passing through. Yesterday we were having one of those conversations, and we were hemming and hawing over several options that all seemed equally bad. We decided to haul up our anchors and go check out a different spot for a few days. We have been using two anchors because of the reversing current, which presents an extra little challenge when we want to pull them up. Sometimes it takes awhile. Yesterday it took us over 4 hours!! When we started pulling up the first anchor, it wouldn’t move at all. We tried and tried, using the engine to try to break it free, but it would not budge. We realized that the anchor must have caught on something on the bottom and whatever it was, it was big and heavy and wasn’t moving.
We have been hearing stories about all the ships that have sank here in this harbor in front of the fort over the last 400 years. Because of this current I keep talking about, divers have not been able to fully excavate the sunken artifacts that are down there. There is a lot of unclaimed booty just below us! We started fantasizing about some lost treasure that we may have stumbled upon. But meanwhile, we were stuck. We kept trying and trying to pull the anchor up, and after extreme effort, we got the anchor to the surface and found it was tangled up in someone else’s lost anchor chain. A lot of nice, expensive chain! Big deal, some of you may be thinking, but Cap’t K started salivating and suddenly got in a really good mood. We just scored a bunch of free anchor chain that was just the kind he had been looking at at the store for a few hundred dollars! The next step was getting the anchor freed from the chain and getting the chain up. After a few more hours of effort, we realized that chain that had caught on our anchor had in turn been caught on another, much bigger chain. This was 3 inch chain that must have belonged to a very big ship. This chain was attached to an anchor who knows how big, and and there was no way we were going to be able to pull this up.
We got into an even better mood at this discovery, as it means is that we just scored not only some extra anchor chain, but also a free mooring! We can now attach a line to this mega chain and rest much easier on anchor! It seems that God just answered our fretting questions of where to go to feel more secure about the coming frontal passage….we are staying put right here!