Anchors Away

Our first night anchoring Heron dishes up all kinds of family fun. Perhaps its because we’ve had a shirts-off kind of day: passing through Canadian Customs at Bedwell Harbour without having to turn over our contraband apples and oranges; sailing beneath clear blue skies; tuna sandwiches, beers, and chocolate chip cookies for lunch. It lulls us all into an unsuspecting coma. But we’re catching on to Sailing Rule No. 1: Day of bliss? Expect a small problem will be lobbed your way soon. Just to keep you on your toes.

So we anchor in 30 feet of water in Ganges Harbor, a popular anchorage off the eastern edge of B.C.’s Salt Spring Island, in the Canadian Gulf Islands. The Canadian Gulf Islands are wilder, scruffier, rockier than the San Juan Islands, and we’ve made our way gingerly through them so far, picking our way past rocks (marked and unmarked), to finally put out 100 or so feet of anchor and chain in this picturesque harbor and call it a night. It’s breezy and we’re not entirely sure we’re holding, but after observing other boats swinging in wide arcs from their anchors we decide that’s the deal. Keeping an eye on the distance between Heron’s hull and our neighbors, we pull out a bottle of merlot.

Over a dinner of grilled steaks, the wind picks up.

“Damn, what was that?” Sam says, putting down his fork. An eerie keening sound is coming from the mast. We look at each other, then Jeff and James rush up on deck. Sam and I sit for a moment, candles flickering on the table. “Like that last dinner on the Titanic, huh?” he quips. Then we blow out the votives.

It’s eerie, unnerving, up above. The wind is suddenly gusting 20 knots, with bursts up to 25. Heron’s mast, rising 65 feet above the deck, is humming. The edge of a cold front has howled in. The boys run to the bow in their bare feet.

“Check the anchor! Does it look like it’s holding???” Jeff is yelling to them in the wind-whipped dark. With each gust we swing in a wild arc, 48,000 pounds of teak and fiberglass at the end of a watery game of crack the whip. But we’re holding.

We don’t sleep very well that night. We’re swinging a little too close to a big granite outcropping, and as Jeff says when we wake up, “all I could dream about was Heron breaking up on the rocks,” but in the gray dawn light we’re still in one piece. So we get up, tune in the radio’s Extended Marine Forecast, and put on a pot of coffee.