One Anchor, Two Anchors

September 13, 2014
We set our anchor and thought we were done for the night.  When our friends arrived we rafted up to their Shannon 51.  No problem we'll pull up our anchor while the Shannon holds our place and set their anchor.  Mark went up front and tried to pull in our anchor- no good.  He did it  that morning without issue.  I went up to help and the two of us couldn't do it.  What's up?  Try again while our friend, an experienced sailor, holds position directly over our anchor.  Remember that our modest 9,000 lb. boat is rafted to his 60,000 lb. yacht.  Our poor cleats!  

On the next attempt I saw another anchor hanging from our anchor.  WTF?  And it was bigger than ours.  I won't go into the cursing and attempts to lift both.  I'll skip to the solution.  Earl had a hook and a line that we used to catch the other anchor chain and transferred the weight to the Shannon.  We finally got ours on board and set his anchor.  We used his windlass to raise the found anchor and 88 feet of chain.  

Lesson: Be ready for anything and the first solution doesn't always work.

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