Bear had forewarned me. A big gale was piling past Cape May and up Delaware Bay’s shoal-brown waters, and the only anchorage around was a small pond in Chesapeake City, just off the Chesapeake-Delaware Canal.
My friend Sara and I had left New York City under sail 36 hours earlier, but we'd switched to the engine when the wind died in the middle of the night somewhere off of Jersey. The calm before the storm and nothing but black skies save for the ever-glow of Atlantic City. We ducked past the Cape May inlet jetties in order to shortcut through the canal in thick darkness but went aground on the Delaware Bay side on an uncharted sand bar caused by the prop-wash of the ferries holding themselves pressed into their docks.
It took an hour of muddling around for us to get off the shoal--the local crab boats that streamed by offered no help, but finally the tide rose enough to slide off of the sandbar and out into Delaware Bay.
“There’s an anchor führer in the harbor,” is what Bear told us over the boat radio. “Don’t listen to him. He just got done yelling at me.”
Bear’s name is Jeff, but his boat is named Bear. He’s a gentle, soft-spoken guy in his 40’s. He looks more bookish than salty, but he’s got plenty of both book and salt in him. He was gunning for the Caribbean, where his wife would fly in to join him for the winter.
I’d never heard of an “anchor führer,” but when we pulled into Chesapeake City’s small, dredged anchorage, and circled to drop Jade’s anchor, a guy climbed up from down below on his boat, frantic and yelling and waving his arms. He was 40ish as well, with long, curly, black hair.
He cupped his hands around his mouth, megaphone style: “You cannot anchor there! You cannot anchor there!”
But with his hands cupped like that, he couldn’t wag his arms in the air like a fool, so he abandoned the megaphone and resumed the arm wagging while screaming at me to leave the area; it seemed that this was much more effective. They say there’s a strong link between language and hand movement, evolutionarily; this guy, frozen in time, was proof.
The only thing to do was take Bear’s advice and ignore the chap. This was the only good anchorage around, and Sara had to catch a ride back to Maine from there. Once anchored, the führer gave us a few final death glares and gave up; there was obviously plenty of room. But it’s understandable—he was simply scared out of his mind about anchoring, and he thought that since he’d gotten there first, he owned the entire anchorage; but it just don’t work that way.
Backtrack a few years to my first trip down the Maine coast in Jade--other than when I bought her and sailed home with Pete of Hermitage. Here’s a link to an article about that trip:
So, it was late morning in Rockland Harbor and the Boss and I were on our second or third round of coffee, seated in the boat’s cockpit as the wind gushed through the mast and rigging.
The Boss and I had grown up together in New Hampshire, and while I’d spent most of my adult life in the mountains in Montana, he’d been sailing catamarans and such on Lake Winnipesaukee. Now, he’d come up to sail with my dog Henry and me to Portland, where I’d be spending the winter aboard Jade.
The hatch on a 30-something foot wooden schooner moored near us slid open. The sun was out, and the autumn air was cool and dry; the harbor water was deep blue and smelled of salt as the breeze wicked it around.
A shaggy-headed kid that looked like he should be surfing in California popped his head up, then climbed topside. The day before, this same kid had paused as he rowed past Jade, and he’d invited us to a fire on the beach. When we’d asked him what time, he’d pondered for a few seconds, then said, “You know… about… evening time.”
He was wearing old jeans. He turned in a slow circle with his arms stretched upward, and when his gaze landed on us, he called, “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” the Boss called back.
The kid paused for a quick moment, then said, “Would you like to join me for a blunt?” He lifted his hand for us to see a joint the size of a rolling pin that he’d apparently held clutched through his morning stretches.
The Boss had our skiff in the water and the oars in hand before I could put my coffee cup down. We rowed over and climbed aboard the boat; I wish I had pictures of it, or knew anything about it, because it was a cool boat. He was living aboard while attending the nearby Apprentice Shop boat building school.
We went below and checked out the wood stove and the wood work and he lit that big joint of his, and I climbed back topside to watch the harbor.
When they came up, we got chatting, and one of us asked the kid what he was going to do after the boat school was over, and if he had any thoughts about getting a boat for himself.
He coughed a bit, then said, “I’m going to get the smallest boat I can find with the biggest anchor I can find.”
People laugh. At the anchor thing. When I first got a sailboat, my old cruiser friend, Uncle Bob, told me that one of the most difficult and important and overlooked things to do well was anchor.
I took him very seriously; I didn’t know shit about it, and he and his wife, Sue, had sailed around the world, so I took everything they said about boats seriously. They handed me a pile of sailing books, and I read the anchoring chapters vigorously, and I was hyper-vigilant when I set my anchor, and all the while I was on an anchor, and after being nearly knocked cold by Uncle Bob, I never tried to hug him again.
But then, I’ve never had a serious mishap while anchored (that sound is me knocking all hell out of some wood) but I have missed a lot of sleep being vigilant. My sailor friend, Flacco, once told me that there’s not much of a line between a captain’s vigilance and their anxiety. I think that’s what he said. Tit for tat but there’ve been plenty of nights on anchor when I leapt out of bed and rushed topside, turned my chart plotter on and grabbed the tiller and readied to start the boat’s engine only to realize that all was well.
Similarly, I’ve had just as many nights when I reacted that way for good reason, when I jumped up and pulled myself out of some potentially serious trouble by listening to whatever caused me to wake; I’ve read that those unconscious instincts come from our emotional brain, so more and more we’re taught not to listen to them because the logic therein might be suspect, and one thing us people love to do is pretend that we're logical creatures.
Once, 20 nm or so east of Charleston, S.C., I’d rafted to a friend’s big boat in a very small creek and joined them for dinner. Sometime after midnight, I bolted awake—it must’ve been that the boat’s motion changed. The wind was blowing and it was raining so hard that it sounded as though a herd of cattle were pissing atop Jade. I climbed into the cockpit. Jade was pinned between the other boat and the edge of the marsh; I could have stepped onto land. I started the engine and untied myself while yelling for them to wake up, and I was ready to go by the time they arrived on deck; Jade’s keel was on bottom but not hard. The tide was going out from under me quickly.
I put Jade in gear and throttled up. Nothing happened. I was stuck, and when the tide went all the way out, their bigger boat would lean against Jade and hold her pinned sideways into the mud and water.
The guys tried to push me out but it was useless; I was stuck. But then suddenly a lucky wave rolled in and lifted the boat and for that quick moment I had enough water to slide out into the narrow creek. I had no idea where to go, and not much room to decide. The currents swirled and tried to pull Jade’s stern up alongside the bow. All I could see was rain and black sky.
It took me a moment to get my bearings with my chart plotter because I wasn’t moving fast enough in any direction for the GPS to know which direction I was either moving or facing, so the little boat icon on the screen just spun.
I finally made my way out of the creek, into the main channel, and motored for an hour or so in the wall of rain before anchoring in a wide spot, hoping like crazy a tug with a barge didn’t come blasting through. I set the AIS alarm on the boat radio to sound if any boat came within a mile of me (not all boats have Automatic Identification Systems, but the bigs ones that I was worried about—like tugs with barges—do.).
So the kid in Rockland had had a point, and his ideal was the opposite of the contemporary cruising paradigm. Now the boats get larger in direct correlation to the disappearance of the knowledge base which surrounds them. Near Palm Beach, a young couple with two kids and an extravagant boat anchored dangerously close to me when high winds were forecast, and when I mentioned this to them, they said, “We know what we’re doing. We used to be into van life.”
Now, a decade and a bunch of un-tallied miles later, I have a fairly small boat with a pretty big anchor, and all up and down the eastern seaboard, I’ve seen more anchoring bloopers, mishaps, and accidents than I can write about here. Which isn’t to say I’m a master at the art of anchoring; I’m diligent, and I'm learning, and I try very hard.
Anchoring can get tricky, especially in tight places, or with big tides or winds or confused currents; boats are going to swing around their anchors. The ratio of anchor rode—rope or chain—to the depth of the water should be roughly 6:1 (i.e. 60 feet of rope or chain used when in 10 feet of water), so a captain needs to be cognizant of not only where boats are anchored, but where the anchors themselves are—and what the future winds and currents will do. It takes an ability to form a mental map of the scene. In tight anchorages, like the Führer’s pond in Chesapeake City, boats need to share their circumferences and swing together as the winds and currents shift. The Führer wasn’t capable of this degree of mental mapping.
I ran into him again in Annapolis, Maryland; I should have recognized his boat, but I did not. The anchorage was the tightest I’d ever seen—docks holding big, fancy boats edged out into the small harbor; other boats were anchored in every pocket of open water. It scared me.
I took a lot of time to assess the place, and I finally found a spot to drop my anchor. As I coasted in, I ran to the foredeck and was about to let the anchor drop when I heard screaming from shore. I looked up, my anchor chain in my hand. Jade drifted over and beyond the spot I was to have dropped the anchor and headed now toward some outlandishly fancy boat on a marina dock.
On shore stood the führer, waving his arms as if herding pigeons, yelling his face off so that the entire anchorage could hear him.
I got back to the tiller, turned the boat, and looked around. There was his boat; far, far away from mine. It took me two more circles to hit the spot again, and he yelled at me the entire time, and by the time I was anchored, he was approaching me in his skiff.
He had with him an intelligent looking, attractive woman and a child. He was still yelling. She looked embarrassed. He came alongside and told me I was too close to his boat and that I’d have to move.
We argued for a while, and I finally said, “You can’t be pulling this shit,” then, fruitlessly, added: “We’re all in this together,” and I went below.
A small boat with a big anchor. The sailor-author Bernard Moitessier (he wrote The Long Way, and a few others, which are fantastic) is famous for having thrown his anchor overboard while at sea, he being of the mindset that he didn’t want to go near land again for a long, long time; so why carry the anchor?
He’s the exception. He also navigated with an actual globe. That’s a different context altogether. (The Long Way is about the first Golden Globe solo, nonstop around the world race, which included the great Capes—Hope, Horn, and Leeuwin. He would have readily won the race, but he turned back when almost home and sailed halfway around the world again because he didn’t want to stop sailing. That book, and Ice Bird by David Lewis are fantastic sailing books).
My big anchor is known far and wide as the Captain Chris. You may recognize Captain Chris as the engine-lifter and more from previous posts, but he’s a bit elusive. He gave me a 55 pound fisherman style anchor—this style is known as a Luke—that I carried aboard Jade and now carry on Polaris Jack; it's one of the few items I kept when I sold Jade. The Captain Chris anchor and Halsey, the Monitor wind vane--polar in their functions--are my favorite pieces of boat equipment. It’s especially fun to throw the Captain Chris overboard because he’s famous for falling overboard if the rum gets the best of him. As he once said while climbing back aboard, soaked: “Where I’m going, I won’t need any pants.”
An anchor, and the process of anchoring, signifies safety, sleep, security while afloat. Over my life, which has been quasi-nomadic at best, I’ve come to view myself as rotating around an anchor that is now set in downeast Maine; it centers me, and brings me back even as winds take me to Montana or the Bahamas or wherever; it’s a tangible tie—more than a metaphor.
And of course I ran into the Führer again. This time down in Oriental, North Carolina, where I seem to run into quite a few characters, including a guy who had a completely gutted sailboat—apparently he had nothing down below, just a hull like an empty tent. But he had a pet pig with him. He’d walk it around town on a leash. Everyone loved it. He was an Afghan or Iraq vet, living what struck me as a pretty good lifestyle in the wake of seeing whatever it was he saw over there. He had propane tanks strapped to his mast. Furthermore, in her own boat, but traveling with him, was his girlfriend. Rumor had it that she was nearly blind and had no navigational equipment, so she followed him with her bow close to the stern of his boat so to find her way.
There's a lesson there.
So anyway, another big gale was on the way, this time to Oriental. Captain Chris and his special lady friend, Sara, were there, and they decided to leave town to anchor in a protected creek on the other side of the Neuce River. I wanted to visit my friends Anne and Nev in town, so decided to stay. But the anchorage wasn’t any good in a moderate blow, let alone a gale.
Oriental is a boat-friendly town, though, and they have several free docks available on a first come, first serve basis. I was anchored in the outer harbor, so I paddled my canoe into the small inner harbor to see if there was space on the dock before bringing my boat in.
There was plenty of room—only the führer hadn’t pulled his boat ahead, so he was taking up the entirety of a two-boat length dock. I tied my canoe up, climbed onto the dock, and knocked on his boat.
It was around 8 in the morning; the winds were to hit soon, so I had to move my boat fast.
He slid his hatch back and stuck his head out and, without hesitating, began yelling at me. We hadn’t seen each other since Annapolis—weeks had gone by. He jumped onto the dock and pushed his chest into mine; he was a big dude, all muscles and jowls. I thought he was going to hit me. Behind us, a sign on a pylon said that boats must pull all the way forward to allow a second boat to fit on the dock; uselessly, I pointed at the sign, at all of the room he was occupying, but he was too busy yelling and chest-bumping me for anything to enter his head.
His girlfriend climbed up from below; I thought for a moment that she would offer some sensibility to the situation, but she didn’t say anything.
Finally, I got back in my canoe and paddled to the inner terminus of the harbor, where the second free dock is. It’s tucked tight to the roadway. My friends Rick and Lynn were there aboard their boat, Acacia. I’d met them in the Dismal Swamp Canal when I almost crashed Jade--first into a grove of trees, and next into their boat. I rafted onto them that night, and we became fast friends; Rick had grown up commercial fishing in the old days on Long Island, so we spoke a similar language. Plus, we all liked food and wine, and Lynn was a hell of a boat chef.
Rick came up with some coffee, and we chatted, and he said he’d come help diffuse the situation. He was in his early 60’s—a calm, smart, savvy guy. If he couldn’t diffuse it, Lynn would have to help, and no wanted to see that; she’d been a career violinist in some high profile New York City orchestra and rumor had it that she had Yo-Yo Ma’s cello on board, and she would happily use it to beat the führer with.
The truth: after retiring as a violinist, she worked with a famous conductor, and was once put in charge of finding the cab in which Yo-Yo Ma had mistakingly left his cello. Put another way, somewhere in New York City was a taxicab with a cello in the trunk and Lynn had to find it; she did. But she didn’t keep it.
When Rick showed up, the boater on the far side of the dock, opposite the führer, finally mustered the courage to help as well, so facing three of us, the führer made a concession: he wouldn’t pull his boat forward, but Rick and the other guy could stand on his boat to help lead mine past so that I could, somehow, parallel park.
See, a huge, metal shrimp boat was tied on the adjacent dock, so there was barely enough room for me to fit my boat between the führer and the shrimper.
I went and got Jade, and we walked her in. Rick and the other guy helped. The führer loomed. His girlfriend watched, obviously a bit scared or confused or probably both.
We got Jade up in front of his boat, which I believe was actually named Outrage, and tied-off, and my friends Anne and Nev—retired cruisers who now live in Oriental—showed up, and I had to keep Anne from lecturing the führer; this was her town, and people were to be nice in her town. She and Nev scooped me up, threw me in their shower, threw my laundry in their washing machine, and helped me fix my busted tiller handle.
Theirs is an interesting story. Following a divorce, Anne bought a boat--a Shannon 28', I think--learned how to sail, and crossed the Atlantic solo. In the UK, she met Nev, a famous motorcycle racer. They crossed the Atlantic together, and eventually built a 50' Wharram wooden catamaran that they named Peace, and they lived aboard and cruised Peace until Nev's motorcycle injuries caught up with him, and his knees gave-out.
Now, retired from the boating life, Nev eats a lot of ice cream. He shared some with me. Anne takes care of her flock of wayward sailors.
I left the dock after the gale and found Captain Chris and Sara picking up the ashes from a major debacle in the creek where they’d anchored—they’d been hit with a small, localized tornado, with winds over 60 knots, and they’d had quite an escapade that left Chris chest deep and pant-less in the water with an anchor in his arms while Sara piloted the boat back and forth in the crazy winds, either trying to save or abandon our endangered captain hero; no one will ever know which. Local lore tells us that when their anchor broke free, the captain leapt into the seas and planted his feet in the mud, then tied the boat to his waist and held it there through the storm. Kind of like Atlas without the hype. Sara was saved.
Last I heard, the führer had to haul his boat out of the water in Beaufort because he’d damaged his rudder in shoal water somewhere. The parabola.