E38 – LATALOLA BESAR TO KAIWATU
The anchor is dragging!
As is often the case, I slept with one eye open and noticed the change in Starlight’s motion during the night. By the time I had figured out there was an issue and was on deck, we had already dragged completely off the narrow shelf we had anchored on and well offshore…luckily!
The next issue in my mind was getting the 65m of chain and the anchor back onboard as we were then drifting in hundreds of meters of water and that’s a lot of weight for the anchor winch to lift. Honestly, I thought it may not be doable with the electric winch and I would need to rig up some kind of block and tackle to haul it a meter at a time…Fortunately, the anchor winch handled it with little problem and I soon had all the ground tackle back on board and we headed out to sea clear of any other dangers.
As we had already left, it seemed the right thing to just keep going (11pm by this point) and so we did. Trying to approach any reef laden shore along that coast in the dark had ‘bad idea’ written all over it.
We sailed through the night and into the morning to arrive at the village of Elo where it looked, from the very vague charts, that there might be an anchorage. Unfortunately, we found it to be only very deep water leading up to a reef shelf with nowhere to anchor Starlight. Unfortunately, we had to bail and head back out to sea and head for the next possible anchorage.
With the GPS semi regularly failing to lock and near zero visibility in some rain bands, the stress was rising inside the captain.
We arrived off Kaiwatu, our next possible anchorage around 1am, and as it was dark, we stood off tacking back and forth offshore till daybreak and we could make a safe entrance.
