Collision at Anchor :-(

We had been guarding our spot (amazing what a hairy eyeball can do to people thinking they can anchor too close) as the sun was going down but we decided to go for an evening swim and an Italian boat dropped anchor waaaaay too close.

The anchorage at Sivota when we first arrived...lots of room!

The Italian boat “EOS” came in at about 19:00 (after we had moved twice during the day to secure a near perfect anchorage) and he dropped his anchor inappropriately close to us.  We told him from the water – (hard to have that hairy eyeball when you’re swimming around the boat) that he was pretty close and that we had 40 meters out. Their crew said that they had 17 meters out .. a 3:1 ratio. Our depth sounder read 10.3 meters – and we have a keel offset of 2.3 meters … so it’s really 13 meters x 3 = 39 meters … oh dear, he’s in trouble. They were nice but perhaps naive.

The wind started howling a little later in the evening … a new Hanse 575 (most of $1,5M) was in the bay and he hailed another boat that he had 70 meters of chain out (70 meters!!) and discouraged him from being too close.

At around 11:30 the wind increased to about 20 knots and the boat beside us started to sail on its anchor as did Tara. If you haven’t experienced it, the way it works is that anchored boats almost always go head-to-wind … which is why we love anchoring because there is always good airflow over the boat and if you pick your anchorages carefully you make sure that the waves are blocked by some land.

Anyway, when the wind is blowing above 15 knots the boat starts sailing … just like when you are sailing upwind. The boat sails on one tack because of the wind blowing against the hull and rigging – it gets to a level of tightness on the chain, then it tacks and does the same on the other side. You end up going in a regular rhythm and if you have enough space, it’s actually a natural and relaxing motion in heavy wind.

This is what crowded looks like...it's at Lakka but you
get the idea. In light wind it's fine...heavy air ... crash!

Unfortunately a 42 Jeanneau doesn’t act the same way as a 50 footer and we ended up coming together bow to bow. There is a small pair of chunks out of our anchor roller … don’t know what happened to their boat … but they we quite gracious and apologetic and immediately lifted their anchor and threw it a few more times until they got it right - somewhere not near us.  I stayed on deck for a couple of hours to make sure that we weren’t going to have more trouble. At a little after midnight another boat came and anchored fairly close to us … GRRRR … after another 2 hours on deck the wind died and I joined Marina in bed. Ross continued to play his WW2 computer game and agreed to look outside every half hour or so. Two more GPS anchor alarms later, we all retire and woke up around 09:00 a little worse for wear.