HIDING BEHIND CAPE FLATTERY

In order to make the longer passage to Ninian Bay tomorrow I had to make this short hop from Cape Bedford to Cape Flattery. Anchors down and dodging 'bullets' of wind off Cape Flattery's headland, I wanted to quote a couple of passages.

A. Where did Cape Flattery get its unusual name? Again, tis Captain Cook! And again, Alan Lucas:
"After the problems encountered off Cape Bedford, where Endeavour got under way after dragging anchors...Captain Cook continued north, passing Cape Flattery and hoping for a passage out of the reefs and shoals to the north. He named it Cape Flattery because at the time....it seemed Endeavour might be free of the threatening shoals. Unfortunately, she was only being 'flattered' into such presumption..."
and...
B. Just yesterday, I was most interested to be forwarded(thanks Stuart) a passage from another sailors blog, Craig Margetts circumnavigating Australia with his family. And it dovetailed too perfectly not to point us back a couple of days ago to when I was discussing why I, as a singlehander, would not entertain certain anchorages. One of those was Cooktown - up a river, nasty currents, shallow and no room, not to mention CROCS!. You might find it interesting.

"...Little did we realise that the wind blowing out of the harbour,(Cooktown) was moving SCARLETT faster than the incoming tide and before we knew it we were drifting over the released mooring line, and it got caught on our port rudder, effectively anchoring the boat backwards by her stern and potentially damaging her steering gear or engines.

After using the dinghy to take the main anchor to a safe point in the middle of the river, Craig tried to free the line by cutting the small pick-up buoy off the mooring. SCARLETT swung around in an unexpected direction, and twisted our new anchor chain around the mooring buoy's chain which then got stuck under the keel. Pushing down into the crocodile-infested waters with his foot, Craig managed to get the large mooring buoy to go under the hulls and SCARLETT appeared to swing free, only to be tethered once again to the buoy - now by the tangled anchor chain which had spun around the mooring like two wires.....

Happy ending?
You can read the entire description at
http://web.me.com/craigandkerry/SCARLETT/Home.html