In the morning both boats were hanging to the west off an east wind and we were too damned close. While I tried to figure out what had happened the skipper from the cabin cruiser came on deck. He asked if I had dragged and I replied that I would be surprised if I had because the anchor had stood up to gusts of over 25 kt and the wind was now light. I told him that I had 15 meters of chain and 70 meters of rope and he said that he had 100 feet of chain and 70 feet of rope. I pulled away from him by pulling in 10 meters of my anchor rope and boat held fine.
I went down below and starting with my initial anchor position to 3 decimal places of seconds and a very accurate ruler facility with the chart plotter I could see that I was 426 freet from my initial location but I had rotated almost 180 degrees on the anchor. 456 ft implied a diameter of my turning circle of 139 meters which was within the turning of 170 meters allowed by the amount of rode I had out. The best theory that I could come up with was that in the light winds his chain was still set to the east while his rope was set to the west.
Arnold telephoned me that he and Sandra had arrived to help me get the boat lifted so I started up the engine and brought up the anchor. That anchor was so embedded in the mud that had difficulty breaking it out. On the way into the marina I called out to the cabin cruiser that my anchor had been firmly bedded down.
I would like to avoid these extremely long anchor scopes in the future and I might replace my 38 meters of chain with 50 or 60 meters of chain and accept the added weight forward. It would spare me the inconvenience of managing the rope-chain combination.
I motored into the marina in 5.5 m of water. Arnold and Sandra were waiting at the jetty in front of the boat lifter and Arnold took my lines. I threw him the bow line which had come out of the bow cleat so he wound up with the entire rope in his hands. We sorted that out then he reminded me that I had not deployed the fenders. All four fenders were on deck ready to go but I had simply forgotten to flip them over the side. We tied the boat up and eventually Sean came and I handed over the paper work that I filled in the night before and showed him a plan of Pachuca's profile to help him decide where to put the lifter straps.
The lift went quite well with Arnold and I on board. The boat was moved to a wash-down area and I was given access to a pressure gun and took my time to clean the hull very, very well - so well that I don't think that I will have to sand it. The hull was in amazingly good shape considering that it had been antifouled 18 months and probably 8000 nm previously. After I finished with the pressure washing one of the lift workers quipped that the boat was ready to go back into the water - she looked that good. Soon Pachuca was on the hard stand.
They do things differently here than in Fremantle. For EPA reasons the boat must be on a vinyl sheet that must be swept every day. The idea is to capture all of the nasties before they reach the ground. They provide electricity but no water, again for EPA reasons. They do not provide ladders for liability reasons but I was invited to use whatever rickety and totally unsafe ladders of wooden scaffolds that I could find. I understand the motivation but the outcome is absurd. Instead of the boat yard providing safe ladders they leave it up to the customer to use unsafe means to get on his boat but that is OK because the boat yard is not responsible. Sean could see that too but he has to work to policy.
Afterwards Arnold, Sandra, and I went to the Blue Moose Cafe here in the boat yard and had what I thought was a great lunch. Arnold sneakily picked up the tab while I thought that he was going to the loo.
Back at the boat I passed down to Arnold his spear gun and a bottle of Australian red wind from the Friends of the Western Ground Parrots and off they went on what I hoped would be an enjoyable drive home in clear and sunny weather.
I did some settling-in things like doing my laundry, setting up electric power to the boat, and visiting Safeways for a few grocery items. Tomorrow, Sunday, would be a hopefully a slow-paced day of tidying up the boat, walking around the marina, and planning the tasks that start on Monday morning. My MO is to front-load the professional contacts for rigging, refrigeration, diesel, etc. Once they are scheduled and on the way I'll attend to the things that I can do personally such as the antifouling and the new thru-hull fittings.
Unfortunately I have not been able to find a WiFi network within boat range, though I will make some enquires at the office because one of their brochures state "WiFi". Also, there is the issue of grounding for the HF radio. Arnold agrees that we must ground the HF radio literally into the ground using some sort of a spike, or to a water pipe of we can find one. The point is that my access to Sailmail and communications with Richard are in jeopardy until we can solve this problem. Arnold says that he can bring a spike that we can hammer into the ground. As a stopgap I've connected the trailing wire that I used to augment the Monitor paddle grounding to one of the 6" spikes used to hold down the tarp under the Boat. I actually managed to get a connection the Friday Harbor. If this entry is in the blog it means that there was just enough propagation to enable transmission of the message, no doubt with many retries and a degraded speed.
Arnold and Sandra took many photos and some movies of the lifting operation and Arnold will post those from his home.
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