Stats for December 29, 2018

Origin: Key West @ Conch Harbor Marina

Destination: Jewfish Basin

Distance: 23 miles

Speed: 8.9 mph

Time on the Move: 2 hours and 28 minutes

We left Key West mid-day to head for a nearby anchorage called Jewfish Basin. The afternoon was beautiful and the water was calm which was amazing. The kids and I went out to the bow so we could enjoy all the tour boats, parasailers, and cruise ships as we headed out of town. Then we turned north and later east to head towards our anchorage. The Gulf side of the sourthern Keys is very shallow, so we had to go pretty wide away from “land” to ensure we were in deep enough water. It was a beautiful trip.

We dodged quite a few crab pots heading into our anchorage, and also some long-snaking, shallow areas. We carefully consulted the charts to ensure we were in deep enough waters, once cruising right by a dozen boats that were anchored on a sandbar with people and dogs in just inches of water. Thank goodness for technology!!

We found a great spot to anchor around 2:30 and enjoyed the water. Mike convinced Hayley and Tobin to jump in for a quick swim with him, but Colin and I weren’t quite sure we wanted to swim with sharks yet, so we decided to play cards. (Not that there for sure WERE sharks, we just weren’t quite sure that there WEREN’T sharks…)

Colin created a new card game that he calls “Old.” It is a fun, quick game, and will definitely be played in my classroom when I get back to the real world. It’s perfect for Kindergartners-3rd graders (and moms, obviously!).

The rest of the night wasn’t supposed to be eventful. Dinner, part of a movie before kids went to bed, I fell asleep on the couch immediately after the kids did, and then woke up an hour later to Mike yelling that we had dragged anchor and were almost washed up onto shoals a mile from where we anchored. It was a stroke of luck that Mike glanced at the chartplotter when he went up to the flybridge to turn off the radio before bed. At that time he noticed we were not shown to be anchored where we were before and he started to panic. It was about an hour of extreme panic and teamwork for both of us before we got the boat back to where we were “supposed” to be. (Throw in an accidental pocket dial to your family while you’re screaming and yelling about where you are and where you’re supposed to be at 10:00 at night and you’ve got a recipe for disaster!!) We were probably 200 feet or so from being pushed up onto some very shallow areas (after dragging 4000+ feet) which would have been very stressful, very expensive, and potentially very damaging for the boat. It was not our finest night at anchor, but we caught it in time and now we set an anchor alarm EVERY SINGLE TIME we drop the anchor. Sometimes it takes a bad experience to learn your lesson, right?!

Here is the more detailed description I posted on our FB page INNTWadventures. I’m trying to forget the details of the whole situation and just remember the main idea, that you should always set an anchor alarm!! (By the way, if you don’t follow us on FB, make sure you look us up!! We post several times a day and you can read about where we ACTUALLY are right now, lol!!)

Last night we experienced one of the issues every boater dreads, but we are OKAY!! We dropped anchor at about 2:30pm in a little tucked in bay in the Keys (meaning we weaved our way thru some shallows to a nice protected spot about 7 feet deep). Our anchor held fine all afternoon while we snorkeled, played games, and ate dinner. Then, apparently, around 7:50 our anchor started dragging (and fast!!) while we were watching part of a movie and putting the kids to bed. We didn’t notice a thing until Mike happened to come up to the flybridge to turn off the radio and zip the windows shut for the night around 9:30. He glanced at the chart plotter to check the trail of where we were swinging around the anchor only to see that there was no swinging, just a long trail of where we’d dragged. We moved about 4500 feet in just over an hour. We were just 200 feet away from grounding according to the charts, but it was so pitch black out there we couldn’t see a thing. After some quick panicking, some talking it thru, and some classic teamwork, we had a plan. We pulled up the anchor and relied on the charts and radar to get away from the shallows as quickly as possible. I used the spotlight to look for crab pots (and actually saw hundreds of jumping fish all around us). We made it back to our original spot (silly or smart?) and dropped the anchor again. We watched the charts for a few hours before trusting that the anchor was set. We both set anchor alarms on our phones, and I woke up about every hour to check that we weren’t moving again. The crazy thing is that we actually stopped dragging for about an hour before we even realized we’d moved at all. If we would have kept dragging at the previous pace for that hour, we would have run aground and had a whole new set of issues to deal with today. We don’t really know why we dragged at all, but we aren’t used to anchoring on the hard bottom that surrounds most of the Keys, so that could have something to do with it, along with a 15knot wind and a rising tide. We’ve never dragged before, so it is a mystery to us, but we have learned to set that anchor alarm on the phone immediately, every time, even if we don’t expect a problem holding. It was super scary for us, but the kids slept thru it all, and we didn’t have any damage or issues, so we will count it as a big learning experience!!

This is the zoomed-out view of our path from our chart plotter. The solid line was the safest “deep water” line Garmin suggested we follow. The dotted line on the left is the line we went IN TO the anchorage on. The big dotted loop in the middle is wavy on the left because we dragged there over the course of 2 hours and solid on the right side because we drove in a straight line right back to our same anchorage (not sure if the same anchoring spot was smart or dumb, but it worked out). You can see how close our dotted line was to the darker blue areas (shallow!!) and green spots (land!!). YIKES!!

We hightailed it out of there the next morning and weren’t sad to see it go. You can see a crab pot here on our way out of the anchorage, and those light areas off in the distance were so shallow that they were actually islands at low tide. Thank goodness we didn’t end up washed up on them!!

Thanks for reading and following along on our adventures. Good and bad, every day is an adventure!!