Preparedness & Good Luck Pay Off
27 February 2017 | West End Roatan, Honduras
Susan / sunny, windy, 86 degrees F
The combination of preparedness and good luck helped us avoid disaster today. With the continued windy conditions we double-check the mooring lines, safety line, mooring pennant and eye each afternoon. We leave Anchor King (Jerry's anchor alarm) running day and night. The anchor is ready to deploy, and we'd talked about where we would anchor should we need to in the dark. Other than the in the dark part, all of this came into play minutes after we return from our beach walk and secure the dinghy.
We had just popped the top of a couple of cold beers and were enjoying them when Anchor King goes off. I look out the front windows to see Vida Dulce sideways to the wind; the mooring may have just failed. I go to the bow to confirm. Yep, we're no longer attached to something attached to the bottom of the sea. The sailboat just entering the anchorage and motoring along side us confirms he saw it "go". I start hauling up lines: mooring lines, safety line, mooring pennant line.... Jerry starts the engines and comes forward to help me haul up the actual mooring, still attached to all of these lines. It had come "unscrewed" from the bottom! With everything out of the water, we slowly motor to a location that looks like more sand than turtle-grass and drop the anchor. It takes us several tries to get a hold but eventually we do, well outside the mooring field. Jerry snorkels and confirms there is plenty of chain on the ground and the anchor is set, although it is in grass & sand.
This is the 6th mooring failure of some type since we arrived. Two mooring pins broke off their bases and three pennants broke somewhere between the pin (base) and the pennant. We know of two other moorings whose pennants are down to just 2 strands, making them surely next to fail. At this rate, this anchorage could revert to being that again rather than a mooring field.
So the lucky part is we were on-board when the mooring failed. If we had still been on our walk or had gone to town, Vida Dulce surely would have been on the reef.
All of the other moorings are taken, which is just fine, I feel safer on our trusted ground tackle anyway.