June 20, 2009

E blow tumas Efate
E blow tumas Efate! I'm practicing a little Bislama language here. "E" can be just about any object. Derived from "he" but just as good for "it" or "she". Tumas comes from "too much", but can be used for "a lot". In this case it really does mean too much. We got strong wind warnings for all of Vanuatu yesterday, with 25 to 30 knots predicted from the SE. I wasn't worried. We'd had 25 knots SE several times here, and our anchorage was comfortable and well protected. I'll blame part of my poor judgment on having a terrific cold, too. Sore throat, fever, what the medical journals describe as "general malaise". When it's going to blow hard and load the anchor up heavily, paying out more line improves the angle of pull and reduces shock loads, so long scope on the anchor is just good sense. I left all as it was when we went to bed, early, to sleep off the cold. That didn't play out.
Just before midnight I woke up with the canvas awning thrashing, threatening to destruct. Karen was sleeping like the dead, so I just ran out and pulled it down. Before I finished the noise of the wind rising still more had Karen up, asking if everything was OK. I thought so, but sat up a few more minutes to see. Soon we both were noticing a motion that wasn't right. It was now misting rain, so we threw on jackets before we went out again. The pitch black was pretty disorienting, but I had an idea where the little dots of light from 3 other yachts in the bay should have been, and they weren't there. We were drifting in the harbor, headed for the lee shore of Moso Island. It was going to be a hard night.
We shut off all the lights, to let eyes adjust for night vision, and I got the engine started, then turned on the compass light. Sometime in the last couple weeks we must have snagged the wire with a jib sheet. One wire terminal was gone. I grabbed a jumper wire and in a minute we could soon see directions. Karen hit the power button for the depth sounder. It cocked to one side and stuck down. Backlighting on, but no readout. No more time to fool with instruments. We were blowing downwind, NW, so it was safest to go slowly back upwind, SE. And I needed to pick up the 80 feet of chain and anchor dangling off the bow. As I went to do that, we noticed we were suddenly no longer beam on to the wind, but headed up. The anchor must have caught as we approached the shore. A sweep with the big searchlight showed trees behind us, but not getting closer. That gave us a couple of minutes to get oriented again. We saw what we thought were the anchor lights of the other boats. We couldn't stay where we were safely, as building waves would probably break the anchor out again. Karen started driving, and I retrieved the anchor. We headed for the lights. In the biggest gusts, I couldn't stand up on the deck, but had to crawl. That's a good bit more than 30 knots. Fortunately, it would drop to less than 20 for a minute or two between gusts, so we could make headway.
We were beginning to make out the skyline of the surrounding hills, in the tiny bit of light from the cloud-shrouded sliver of a moon. I periodically swept around us with the spotlight, confirmed no land in range of the beam, then ran below and got out the GPS and started it up, as I laid out a chart. Electronics to the rescue again. I'd written down our coordinates when we first anchored, so we just needed to get back there. It turned out the first set of lights we targeted were from a little village on Efate. That became clear when I charted our position. We adjusted course, and found two more lights, which we could soon identify as anchor lights. As we approached them we found shelter from the worst of the wind, blocked by the Efate shore. We eased in toward the trees until I could see a little pattern of the bottom when I played the searchlight on the water. No time for niceties now, we put the anchor down, and payed out a hundred feet of scope. We stopped. This was good.
A check of position against the chart showed us somewhere north of our previous anchorage, but we weren't going hunting again unless we had to. We squared things away a bit, and I found that with a complete shutdown and reboot the depth sounder worked. 12 feet of water. Good enough. I had the VHF radio on, and heard a couple of other boats checking with each other as they dragged, and one picked up and re-anchored. Knowing they'd probably seen us out motoring around, I got on the radio and let them know we were anchor down and stable. All vessels set an anchor watch for the next couple hours, until the gusts settled down to less than 30 knots. I napped and checked anchors until dawn.
In the morning light we could see that the anchor lights were from two boats we hadn't known were around, hidden from our previous anchorage by a point of land. Our anchor chain snaked between and over a dozen coral heads. With the tide down, we couldn't get Sequester in to pick it up. I collected the anchor using the dinghy, after a swim to untangle things, and we drifted out to clear water. By 07:00 AM we were back where we wanted to be, with TWO anchors set, with PLENTY of scope. Took a lot of naps today, and the gusty wind has dropped a good bit. We're feeling better. But we understand people who trade in the cruising boat for a camper van. Ted