Last night at anchor was not the quietest. Possibly partly our fault, but easy to be wise with hindsight.
As previously mentioned it took a few attempts to be sure the anchor was holding when we arrived. The third time we were happy, but then wondered if we were too close to our closest neighbour at anchor. It's always difficult to be sure, distance can be disceptive. The (small) anchorage was crowded with 11 boats in, and there was not a lot of room anyway.
Jonathan snorkelled our anchor, checked it was in OK, and checked the position of our neighbours anchor as well as the area around to make sure we were safe (no rocks) if we moved around the anchor at night. The observation was that our neighbour was well clear, the boats were well separated, although our neighbour had a little less chain than he might - probably just about 5x depth whereas we had a little more - maybe 6-7 x which seemed right given the marginal holding.
Over the next few hours we moved a little, but never got early close to our neighbours, although they did put out their fenders on our side in case we were to clash, so they must have been slightly nervous.
So around 9.30 as dusk arrived the wind changed, and we found ourselves lying in line with our neighbours rather than side-to-side, and felt too close for comfort then. We were probably only 5-8 meters away. One solution would have been to take up chain, but given the marginal holding that would have risked dragging on to them, so as light fell we decided to re-anchor.
We seemed to dig in nicely at second attempt and put a good amount of chain, 7x. It was though too dark to do a visual check on the anchor (our preferred method) and also too dark to see exactly how close were now were to the shore in the event the wind changed in the night, although we knew we were closer than before (necessarily to move us away from our neighbours).
We decided to sit tight, and set our two anchor watch devices with close margins.
Just as we had settled down (again!) a huge monohull appeared in the dark (55' we later discovered) and was obviously struggling to find anywhere to anchor given it was crowded, they were huge, and it was dark. In the end they dropped anchor adjacent to us, closer to the beach, and with very little swinging room.
So a night of watching things move developed! We sat very nicely and despite concerns we were definitely in a good spot, albeit a little closer in to the beach than ideal. The 55' boat kept an anchor watch, even using their engine to manoeuvre away from the boat downwind of us in the night, taking chain up, and eventually re-anchoring in the early hours - this movement keeping most of the anchorage awake!
At breakfast time the wind changed again, and 55' boat then came towards us, ending up just a few meters from our bow, at which point we called out to the sleepy watchman, and they hurriedly weighed anchor and left completely - heading off for somewhere else!
We left shortly afterwards to head to Githion, with an initial light-ish headwind, which then strengthened to a much higher than forecast 5-6 with quite big chop. We beat in to this with triple reefed main sail, engine assisted, and were a bit bothered when nearing Githion to see no sign of it dropping and wondered if the harbour would be untenable in this strong NE wind. We made a note of a couple of alternate places in the lee of the wind, but decided to have a look at Githion first, and arrived outside the harbour with white horses everywhere! Happily the direction looked OK, and we entered the harbour with ease, and found a space on the quay.
The crew deserved and enjoyed their reward ice cream :-)
The photo is of the Islet of Kranae, at Githion, where Paris took Helen of Troy for their first night after their elopement. No doubt for a delicious ice cream too, but we are not sure it would have been worth the 10 years of war afterwards!