More Storms

At the Heywood Island Anchorage, we woke to a nice morning with calm winds and blue skies.

The forecast was going to be for winds to build during the day and rain and thunderstorms in the afternoon.

We messed around on Selkie until about 11 o’clock and then picked up anchor and headed towards Snug Harbor, an hour away.

Snug Harbour was a milestone for us. This anchorage marked our seventh straight days anchoring, the most we had done on Selkie.

We had figured out the electrical systems with our batteries, how to manage them and how much they can stand.

It gives us a lot more confidence to comfortably be overnight every night as long as we use the generator to charge the batteries to a certain charge level.

When we arrived at Snug Harbor, we tried to stern tie. “Stern tie” means you drop anchor, then hop in your dinghy and run a line off your stern to a tree or rock or other attachment point on shore.

A stern tie prevents the boat from swinging, allowing for less space needed for anchoring.

We successfully ran the line off the stern of the boat to a tree on shore, and tied off.

However, we made a mistake with the anchor.

We didn’t set the anchor deep enough or with long enough scope (meaning not enough anchor line, or chain in our case).

We could hear the chain rumbling as the anchor bounced across the bottom.

According to the charts, it were supposed to a clay bottom, but it sounded more like the anchor and chain was bouncing across rocks along the edge of a cliff underwater.

So we released the stern line, picked up anchor and and anchored out in the middle of the cove.

The bottom was over 40 feet deep, but we had enough chain that we were able to put out plenty of scope on the anchor rode (what sailors call their anchor rope) and we were safe and sound in the middle of the cove.

After settling in, we noted there was a hike to a lake by Snug Harbour. So we put the dinghy in the water and headed to the trailhead.

The hike was not that long, but the lake was nice, and allowed us to look off to the west where we noticed a bunch of dark clouds forming.

We hiked back to the cove, dodging poison ivy here and there as well as some mosquitoes.

As Libbie and I hopped in our dinghy, we started to hear rumbling in the distance so we did our storm prep on Selkie and settled in with our respective books.

Pretty soon, the storm was on us, with plenty of lightening, wind, and rain. It even hailed again, our third time for hail in seven days.

Snug Harbour was great, and aptly named. We saw one gust at 35 knots, which meant that we would have seen much stronger had we been in more unprotected waters.

After the storm went by, it became a beautiful day.

I’m starting to like these hail storms. They do a great job scrubbing Selkie’s decks!

But it’s ok if I don’t see any more for a while.