We started day 24 at approximately 5 am in an anchorage off Porthcressa Beach, St Marys.

This anchorage is on the southwest side of the island (pictured below). The anchorage is highlighted in green, and roughly where we were anchored is marked with a red dot.

We heard a loud thud and scraping on our chain. Looking out of the skylight from bed, we saw another mast oddly close by.

At first, we didn’t know what was going on, had we dragged? No! Our anchor alarm had not gone off. Also, we were on the outside of the anchorage. It must be someone else!

Leaping out of bed and onto deck we discovered that another boat had dragged anchor from further inshore into us!

These hungover French sailors on a Doufort 24ft sailboat didn’t notice themselves dragging and hitting us, and didn’t surface until after we loudly knocked on their hull and already had our fenders out. If they didn’t hit us they would have been taken straight onto the rocks or out to sea.

Initially, they hit the bow roller, chain and snubber before gradually turning to come alongside us.

Once up they also got some fenders out to put between the hulls, engine on and tried pulling up their chain with the electric windlass to find it didn’t work. They pulled it up by hand (something we are used to on Hannah!) with some help from us getting the anchor over the bow.

Judging by how quickly they pulled up the chain they probably only had 10 meters or so of chain out, and we were in 10 meters of depth at high tide. They would have been in 8-10 meters of depth where they were anchored.

Minimal damage, just some light paint scratches on Hannahs’s bow as the metalwork, chain and snubber took most of the hit on the nose and we were on deck before anything else could happen, holding the other boat away from Hannahs’s hull.

No pictures or videos of the actual event, but let’s hope it doesn’t happen again…

Nice to know Hannahs’s anchor, a brand new Mantus 45 lbs Galvanized Steel Anchor can easily hold 2 boats.

Anchor Alarms

We are both very glad that we have an anchor alarm that we have learned to trust (after a bit of a rocky start with it, not literally thankfully 😉 ).

We use Sail Grib AA (the android app) on the tablet that we use for navigation.

The alarm is very loud and there is no chance of you sleeping through it, just make sure it has a good GPS signal, or you’ll be woken up by the alarm telling you it doesn’t know where it is!

It’s also what shows us what our swing pattern looks like after a night of anchoring.