Jascat wandering around at night

[note: this crossing was made on Feb 23, we've been out of WiFi access till now]

We left Great Harbor Cay Marina at 7:30am and arrived at Hard Bargain at about 3:45pm. No sailing on this trip, winds were less than 8 knots (usually much less) the whole way.

Instead of Hard Bargain they should call this place Hard Anchoring. The sea bottom in the recommended anchoring area is thick grass over hard sand. We must have tried a half dozen times to get the anchor to set. Most of the times we dropped the anchor, it would just drag across the bottom. No hint that the anchor even tried to dig in. On one occasion it dug in, but popped out when we tried to set it using our normal power setting of 2100 rpm. We finally got a set that would hold 1700 rpm, and after diving the anchor to check it out, we declared the set good enough for settled conditions. What that means is that we will have to sit up on anchor watch if a wind comes up tonight. So I'm going to stop the blog here and continue tomorrow so I can tell you how it all came out.

Next day: Fortunately the wind stayed calm the whole night so we didn't have to stay up (that's against the forecast, by the way, the wind was supposed to blow up to 15 knots). That doesn't mean we slept well, however. We never do when the anchor set is in the least doubtful. To help us sleep, we set an anchor alarm on the handheld GPS. Thus, if Jascat moved more than 100 ft from the place the GPS was initialized, an alarm would go off. It did go off during the night but we could tell that Jascat was moving from north of the anchor to south due to a current change. The picture shows the path that Jascat took during the night as she drifted around the anchor.