Hey, can you come up here? Somethings on the anchor chain and it’s freaking me out.
Hmm. Not something that I wanted to hear just then. It’s six am, and it is still pitch black out. We are pulling up our anchor in Charleston for an 11-hour cruise to Hilton Head, and we need to get going before sunrise. Meredith is not a squeamish type, so my first instinct that there was something dead and rotting on the chain couldn’t be correct. This must be serious. We had just started pulling up the chain and the anchor was still holding us in place, so I figured it was ok to leave the helm where I was steering the boat.
It’s cold in the predawn November weather, and I’m wearing both pairs of pants that I have on the boat to fight the chill. The excess clothing makes walking up to the front of the boat where she is operating the windlass (the thing that pulls up the anchor) difficult, but I manage. She’s shining the floodlight down on the chain, and I can barely make out a clump of what looks like brown chunks. Feces. It looks like a giant chunk of human excrement, and I can see why she wouldn’t want to touch it. I turned on the deck light so we could see better, but it gave us no additional visibility.
On closer examination, with a literal six-foot pole, it becomes obvious that we’re dealing with something else. Unless it’s petrified, this hard chunk could not be feces. Perhaps it’s a log? The sunrise is starting to give us a small bit of light, and we are able to see a bit more of the object. The bottom part is twisted and tangled hopelessly in our anchor tackle (both the chain and the bridle). We try to dislodge it with the pole, but reversing the twist is necessary. That is not an easy task when you’re dealing with a solid steel chain holding a twenty-five thousand pound boat in place.
We took a step back to scratch our heads and evaluate the situation. The sun continued to rise and we can see fairly well now. What we thought was a small chunk, also had a very large branch coming off of it. It’s likely a root ball and a trunk. With this new knowledge, we know that we’re going to need to do some serious twisting and pulling. Using an additional boat hook, we get the chain and bridle off of the main bit and twist the beast around. It is not wood at all. It is iron. Extremely rusty iron with a point on one end. What we have pulled up is a second anchor that must have been discarded or lost at some point in the past.
More spinning, grunting, and cursing finally sets the object free from the tangle. It then begins a slow descent down our chain. We can hear and feel it sliding down. Link by link. It stops its plunge on what we can only assume is our actual anchor. We are now at the risk of pulling it up with our anchor, and we will then have an extremely large rusty metal anchor point dangling under our boat, with nothing keeping us in place.
I need to get back to the helm to keep our catamaran from drifting into another boat, so we wake up Hunter (boy, 10) to help Meredith with the anticipated disentanglement. Luckily, our anchor comes up clean, so the discarded one must have fallen back to the bottom. Hunter heads back to bed, and we begin our journey about 45 minutes late. I went to turn the deck light off to discover that I had never turned it on in the first place, which explains why it didn’t give us much light.
The plus side is that the sunrise is spectacular, and the image of it lighting up the sky behind the USS Yorktown will always be one of my favorites.