The overnight that wasn’t

It was a beautiful day and we wanted to go sailing, it was time to jump the hurtle of sailing with just the 4 of us. The weather had predicted scattered thunderstorms, but we hadn’t seen any all day. As we had to clean up and organize the boat before leaving, we didn’t get off the dock until 4:30pm. We figured we would go out for a short sail to test the waters and see how it went.

We discussed maybe picking up a mooring somewhere for the night, or perhaps testing out our anchor for the first time, but we didn’t have any set in stone plans.

We sailed up Casco Bay again, headed in the same direction as our 7-hour sail from the week before. Chef Ben again whipped up a delicious meal of grilled chicken sandwiches while underway. Just before we were going to eat, we arrived at what we thought might be a good place to anchor for the night.

The back side of Little Chebeague island has a great little cove that Tristan and I stayed in 4 years ago aboard our friends Cape Dory Typhoon. There is just enough space on the Cape Dory Typhoon for an adult and a 4 year old to sleep, sort of. We had a very rolly night, and while we didn’t get much sleep, we had a great time. I thought it might be a good place to spend Jelanea’s first night out as well.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a good place to anchor that we felt comfortable with, so we decided to try another anchorage at nearby Cow Island. Cow island is a privately owned island by a local outdoor education company Rippleffect, but the West side is open to the public, and there is a small mooring field there, and anchoring among the moorings is allowed.

Our first attempt at finding a good spot gave us a quite the scare. As we slowly inched forward looking for a good place to drop the anchor the depth went from 9ft to 2.3 feet all of a sudden. I threw us into reverse and backed down and also turned out toward the bay. I think we went over a rock, that was mentioned on the chart.

Its important to note that our depth sounder is mounted on the bottom of our keel, so when it read 2.3 feet it was actually about 8ft deep there, so we didn’t run aground, but with only 2 ft of water under out keel I was pretty freaked out.

We left the rocky section behind and found another good looking place to anchor between some moornings. Having an audience of several boats wasn’t helping my nerves at all, but I tried to just pretend they weren’t there and concentrate on our boat.

We found a good spot, I gave Ben the go-ahead to drop the anchor, and the anchor wouldn’t go down. It went down about 4 ft and then the windlass was just spinning and no more chain was going out.

At this point it was getting pretty late, and I wasn’t interested in figuring out what was wrong with the windlass/anchor chain, or trusting our anchor at all, so we decided to just motor back to the marina where we could tie up in our slip and know we were safe and sound.

We hated to give up on our first over-night adventure, but the kids were tired, and we didn’t know what was wrong with the anchor chain, and it was time to do the responsible thing and think about trying again another time.

It was about a 30 minute motor back to the marina, and by the time we got to the outer attenuater we were pretty glad we had decided to return home. The rain had stared a few minutes before, and was coming down in droves as we turned into Fore Points. The nearby thunder was freaking the kids out, and we were so glad to be second from the safety of our slip.

The landing wasn’t the best I’ve ever done, and we actually had to back out and try again, but the second time it was very smooth. After securing the boat to the dock we left cleaning up the boat for later and got the kids into bed for the night.

It was good to know we made the right decision in returning home as we watched huge storms pass to the north east of us, right over the places we had thought about anchoring the the night. With reports of hail and 30 knot winds, the safety of our little slip was even more comforting for the night.

Our first overnight will simply have to wait for another time.