Midnight Move

One of our Neighbours, a nice 120 footer anchored and tied
to the shoreline

At around 1am Ross banged on my door “Dad, get up I think we are dragging the anchor” Considering we were 30 meters from shore, the wind was blowing high teens and we’re in 3 meters of water, it didn’t take me long to throw on my shorts and get out of bed.

The Anchor Dragged straight back. We were less than 2
boatlengths from shore

We checked the GPS and anchor alarms and they weren’t going off, but you could see the track was definitely inching closer to shore. We had tried to set the anchor in sand but were probably too close to some weed – expecting it to be calm at night like it usually is in the Ionian. We also had more than 40 meters of chain out in 8 meters of water, so lots of scope.

After a few minutes of watching, Ross on the bow, me on the stern, Ross ran back and declared “We have to move now!” I had the engine idling and we had to execute the dreaded “Midnight Move” off a lee shore in  15+ knots of wind – and if you look at the lunar charts – during a new moon … so it was dark, completely dark. At least it wasn’t raining or blowing 30 knots, though if it were either of these there is no way we would have anchored there in the first place.

Ross had his headlight on and took the brake off the windlass and began grinding in the chain, clearing the hawspipe every 5 meters or so to make sure that we don’t jam the mechanism (maybe jamming the windlass on our first anchoring this year was actually someone looking out for us and getting us prepared for this one). I kept the boat on station with the motor. You can sure tell when the anchor comes off the bottom as the bow swings about 90 degrees. As we were getting close to the anchor being off the bottom I had turned the boat away from the 120 footer parked beside us and towards open water. Ross finished hauling the anchor up and we were on our way … but where.

The track from Ormos Skhidinos to Vathy at 01:30am in the dark, no moon either.

Basically we had 3 choices – motor around in circles for 5 hours staying clear of stuff along the way, head out to open ocean, put up the sails and sail towards Athens, or try to navigate into the next bay that has a much better anchorage. My vote was for heading out towards Athens but Ross tempered this with “I don’t want to go out sailing in 20 knots with big waves at night”. When put that way, neither did I. That left powering around for 5 hours until dawn – not my preferred approach, or head into Vathy and its protected anchorage. Plan C it was. Using the GPS(s) … the main Garmin GPS, the IPAD’s Navionics GPS and Mark 1 Eyeball, we gingerly navigated into the fairly narrow pass of Vathy avoiding the island park towards the end of the bay. Ross thought we might want to go stern-to-the-mole, though I think that would have been exceedingly difficult. My thought was to tie up to the gas dock side-to and then get up early and leave – but someone already had that idea and was tied up at the gas dock – plus our charts said that the depths were marginal there for us.

The narrows at Vathy ... nice and wide during the day,
seemed a lot tighter at night-time

In the end we did a couple of loops close to other yachts and dropped anchor. We remained on deck for a half hour watching the other boats and how we anchored relative to them and the wind. At around 02:30 the wind dropped and the boats all changed direction 180 degrees. After a few minutes of near-calm while we were perfectly aligned with the other boats, we declared victory and I went to bed, Ross made himself a sandwich and, I think, made it to bed a little later.

In the bright morning sunshine we see Vathy, a pretty little Greek Island city with an excellent anchorage. Reflecting on it, we dodged a bit of a bullet. Thanks to quick thinking by Ross and some decisiveness, he got us off that bad anchorage. Also it’s fun to see how we all react in difficult situations. Hard to believe – I am the calm one. “Don’t worry, I can control the boat”, “I think we need to start turning here, there is the light, I understand where it is on the chart”. Ross was switched into Overdrive, thinking through options, “I’m going to put the fenders down now so we don’t have to worry about it later”, “do we have the proper lines on the bow and stern if we need them?”, and heading down to the Garmin chartplotter to confirm our positioning relative to the IPAD. I think in the end each of us gained more confidence in the other and each of us credits the other one with having saved the day. I guess that’s what they call Teamwork.