Year 7 Day 286 A Bad Night
14 October 2014 | At Linga Linga, Near Inhambane, Mozambique
Dave/Overcast
The low pressure cell brought its winds to us last night. They arrived right after I posted yesterday's blog. They were not too bad as they were only in the 20 to 25 knots range for about 24 hours. After posting yesterday's blog we both went to bed in hopes of catching up on the sleep we missed during our recent passage. As it turns out, it was not to be.
The winds slowly moved to the southwest, which was expected. However, when they did that, they pushed our boat to the northeast, which was also expected. We did not drag our anchor but it put us about 140 feet closer to the shore as we swung on our anchor and its chain. Since we were facing the wind, the little swells we had were not a problem. However, around midnight I was woken up by a "thump", "thump", "thump". At first I could not figure out what it was since I was so tired. Then it occurred to me that our keels were starting to hit bottom as the little swells passed under us.
I got dressed and went outside to check things out. As I did, I turned on the equipment breaker and looked at the depth meter. It was reading 3.5 feet under our port keel, yet I still was hearing the thumping. With the aid of our flashlight I saw the shoreline was only about 100 feet away. It was getting near low tide. We have up to a 10 foot tidal range here.
I worked to get the boat ready to weigh anchor and move further out into the river channel. When everything was set up, I went down stairs and woke up Mary Margaret. Between the two of us, we tried weighing the anchor but could only get the first 10 feet up. The keels were hitting the face of a sand bar and we could not move over it. Damn!
We shut the engines off and resigned ourselves to being stuck here until the tide rose up high enough so we could move over the sand bar.
We both stayed up to keep a watch on things as the tide continued to recede. By 0100 we were sitting with our keels on the bottom. Fortunately, there was no surf, just little (less than 6 inches high) waves lapping on the shoreline right behind up. We were not in any danger and catamarans with fin keels, like Leu Cat, are made so they can sit on the bottom just fine. My only concern was for the two rudders since they are not made to support any weight. They are mounted so they ride above the keels but since we were sitting on a sand bar, I was not sure if they were touching the bottom also. As it turns out, they were just fine and by 0300 the tide had raised enough to lift us off the bottom.
By 0400 Mary Margaret went back to bed as she knew that we were now fine. I told her we would not move our anchorage out further until around 0800 when it was peak high tide.
We are now anchored in about 500 feet, further out into the river. The anchorage is fine expect when the tide changes. The strong tidal current when the tide comes in pushes the nose of the boat upstream and fights with the force of the wind, which is trying to have us face downstream. The result is that we don't face in either direction and we are broadside to the swells. This makes things a bit rolly.
We spent today repairing more of the head sail, doing a load of laundry and watching episodes from season 11 of NCIS. We had not seen these yet and so enjoyed watching 8 of them. More to watch tomorrow�...