Severed Anchor in the Bahamas: Seven Lessons Learned

Leaving Rhode Island to sail to the Bahamas, I wanted to be untethered, for a while. Adrift at dawn and heading for rocks in a blow was not what I had in mind. Anchor failure was one of my nightmare scenarios. The morning my severed anchor parted with my boat, an unusual snapping sound and lurch woke me, and I slammed my knee leaping out of my berth to investigate. Hobbling on deck, I found the wind blowing around 20 knots, and in the day’s first light I watched my anchor bridle drifting limply ahead of my boat. It should have been tight in this wind. My anchor was clearly not attached. OH ****!

For nearly a decade, I’d been dreaming of sailing my own boat to the Bahamas. I’m a late bloomer, when it comes to sailing—I started with live-aboard sailing school on my 40th birthday. At 48, with an empty nest, I pointed my bow south. My boat is a 32-foot catamaran I’d been sailing for six years on summer weekends and vacations—my crew sometimes called her a “kitten” because she was so much smaller than the other cats.

After anchoring successfully for several summers in southern New England, and several months on my journey down the Intracoastal Waterway in the eastern United States, I trusted the Rocna anchor I’d added to the boat a few years earlier. My old Delta anchor became my secondary anchor on my port bow. Both anchors had 20 to 30 feet of chain followed by a couple hundred feet of three-strand nylon anchor rode. This is a typical setup for a small sailing catamaran. My primary anchor had an old Lewmar windlass that had been fixed so many times, I was carrying a spare windlass, and was determined to replace it before I fixed it again. I thought it was the weakest link in my ground tackle. Nope. It still usually managed to drop and lift the anchor with the push of a button and far more grace than I could muster.

These are seven lessons I learned from my experience waking up with a severed anchor as a 20-knot wind blew me towards a rock jetty. The ones with the ✔ I did, and the ones with the X I failed to do that night.

Lesson one: Schedules and sailboats should not mix. You know this. X

I was one of two boats anchored inside Kidd’s Cove in Georgetown. This small cove is just outside Lake Victoria where many boaters take their dinghies through the narrow lake entrance for shopping and groceries. There was a blow with an expected 180-degree wind shift, and I had crew that needed to make a flight in the morning. After considering several other options, I decided to take advantage of my shallow draft and anchor inside the cove in about six feet of calm water so we could be close to the dinghy dock where my crew would meet her taxi to the airport. I would not have been in this spot if not for the scheduled flight.

Lesson two: Dive the anchor and area around the anchorage. X

I dropped anchor, attached my bridle, and set the anchor in reverse in sand. This was not a safe spot to dive the anchor. There was far too much fast dinghy and other boat traffic to put anyone in the water. Plus, I expected to swing 180 degrees overnight, and my anchor rode would sweep across the bottom—that was too much ground to safely swim and inspect in this particularly busy cove. So, I did not dive the anchor, and I still think that was the right call based on my experience the following day when we got in the water to search for the lost anchor.

Lesson three: Prepare the crew for the most likely emergencies and prepare the boat for a quick response. ✔

I went to bed feeling a bit nervous about the anchorage—mostly because the cove was so small, and I expected to be swinging closer to a newly installed rock jetty overnight. Just before going to sleep, I talked one crew member through the process to start the motors and re-anchor overnight if needed. The one minute we spent talking about this, because he serendipitously asked about it, made the emergency early morning procedure much smoother.

My little catamaran is powered by two Yamaha 9.9 outboard motors that tilt up when not in use. I often tilt them up to get the propellers and lower units out of the salt water while safely at anchor, on a dock or sailing. My boat gets an extra knot of speed when I lift the motors while sailing. It is one of my favorite things about the boat design. It takes just a couple of minutes to lift or lower the motors, if you know what to do, but it is one of the harder manual jobs on my boat.

I intentionally left the motors in the water that night because I wanted to be able to start them quickly if we needed to move overnight. This is probably what saved my boat. I was one boat length from the rocks and blowing quickly towards them when I got my motors started. There likely would not have been time to drop the motors.

Lesson four: Have a spare anchor ready to go ✔or deployed. X

My spare anchor was sitting fully rigged on my port bow. It does not have a windlass, so dropping it was simply a matter of untying the safety line and pushing it overboard. Even my inexperienced crew could do it. On some boats in these conditions, it might be wise to set a second anchor proactively. I’ve had mixed experiences with a second anchor on this boat, and in this small cove I worried that changing the way I would swing in the wind shift might cause us to collide with the other boat on a single anchor. Having the second anchor ready allowed us to get the spare anchor down and set before my anchor alarm even sounded. About that anchor alarm…

Lesson five: Pay close attention to your settings on the anchor alarm or set an anchor watch, or both. X

I set an anchor alarm every single night at anchor. My favorite, so far, is the anchor alarm in AquaMaps because it allows me to see my tracks overnight. The morning my anchor rode severed, my anchor alarm never went off. Why? Because my boat never left the radius I set on the alarm. When I looked at it later, I realized my radius may have been slightly too big that night. I’m grateful I woke to the unusual sound and boat movement before any anchor alarm would have sounded, regardless of the settings. Every second counted.

Although I have set anchor watches on my boat in the past—when crew stay up in shifts all night to make sure the anchor is OK—I didn’t choose to have an anchor watch that night. In general, I value sleep for the crew as a safety precaution. When safely at anchor in calm conditions, it is probably not safer for short-handed crews to lose sleep for a low-risk anchor watch. In hindsight, I would probably choose to have an anchor watch in a similar higher-risk situation in the future in a tight anchorage, wind shift and 20+ knots of wind.

Lesson six: Investigate strange sounds and movements immediately. ✔

From sleeping aboard in many conditions at anchor, I knew the common sounds and motions of my boat. I knew how it felt to swing with wind and current, and the sounds my rigging made in higher winds. I’d chased and secured slapping halyards and woken in waves at anchor. The snapping sound and lurch that woke me as my anchor line split was unlike anything else I’d heard or felt. This experience reaffirmed my belief that weird sounds and motions require investigation immediately.

What happened to us? Not much. Once I saw my limp anchor bridle and suspected we’d lost our anchor, I called for crew to come on deck, and gave the first crew to arrive the “easy” jobs—retrieving the loose anchor bridle and then dropping the spare anchor on my command. I went to the helm and started the motors and got the boat under control and away from the quickly approaching rocks. We re-anchored within a couple of minutes, and help started arriving immediately.

If you’re going to have a boating emergency, Georgetown is an excellent place to do it because of the boating community there. My first help arrived before I even asked for help. Someone from town motored over to me as we set the spare anchor to make sure everything was OK. He said usually when boats anchored this early, something was wrong. I didn’t need his help that morning, but I am so grateful he saw our situation and came to help without being asked.

I did ask for help on the Georgetown VHF cruisers’ net that morning. Volunteers facilitate a cruisers’ net on the VHF radio every morning in Georgetown, and it is an excellent place to ask for help. There are often hundreds of cruising boats in the anchorage. I was safely re-anchored when the cruisers’ net started, but my heart rate still had not returned to normal. On the net, I asked for a dive flag so we could safely look for the Rocna anchor and some advice about the three-strand splice I would need to reconnect my remaining nylon rode to the chain and anchor, if we found it. On the cruisers’ net, I also hoped to warn boats with nylon rode from anchoring in that spot inside Kidd’s Cove. Do not recommend. Zero stars.

A sailor dinghied over and brought me a dive flag immediately after the cruisers’ net, and someone else offered me splicing coaching if I found the anchor. A professional diver offered to help us search for the anchor, but since the anchor was in only six feet of fairly clear water, we decided to look for ourselves first. Once there was enough light, I stood by in the dinghy with the dive flag up on a fishing pole while a crew member snorkeled looking for the anchor. Multiple times I had to warn boats away from my crew in the water. He was often not visible on the surface because he was diving. It took about an hour of snorkeling the shallow water to find the anchor, despite knowing the exact location I’d left it on GPS. The anchor and chain were set well and buried in that lovely Bahamian white sand, and only a piece of nylon rope was visible above the sand. We also found someone else’s severed anchor rode in the same spot, and a sharp, unidentified metal object on the bottom. I suspect that sharp object was the culprit and cut my nylon rode when the wind shifted, and my rode caught on the submerged object. My nylon anchor rode severed about 30 feet from my bow.

Lesson seven: More than 30 feet of chain is worth it in the Bahamas. X

I had 20 feet of chain plus 50 feet of nylon rode out that morning. I prefer a 7:1 scope when anchoring overnight, whenever possible. The boat next to me in the cove also had 70 feet of rode deployed. My first purchase for the boat once I returned to Florida was 100 feet of chain. I rarely needed more than 100 feet of rode in the shallow Bahamas anchorages. If I’d had 100 feet of chain that day, my anchor likely would have stayed connected to my boat.

Later that day, on my sailing adventure, I accidentally attempted to sink my boat with my watermaker, but that is another story…