Still in Bag Harbour

… and will be, it looks like, until Friday Morning.

I’m quite glad we chose to come up to Bag Harbour. The terrain is not as sheltering–the hills are lower–and thus more wind blows through; however, the wind shouldn’t develop into williwaws (high-speed downhill gusts) because there aren’t any fjord-like funnels. The only problem with Bag Harbour is that the opening to deep water is about 90 degrees to the wind direction, so what small waves that make it through the labyrinth of Burnaby Passage come at us on the beam, and cause a bit of rocking.

The bottom is nice gooey mud and I set the anchor quite deeply Monday.

You drop the anchor with around twice the depth in chain as you drift backwards on the wind. Once the anchor appears to hold, you start backing up while letting the chain go out, so the chain will lie flat on the harbour bottom. Once you’ve let out enough chain (given our expected wind conditions, we let out between 5 and 6 times the depth in chain, so about 150 feet), you gently tighten up the chain to set the anchor. Then you increase the speed of the engine to put some real force on the anchor. In a normal anchorage, I’d crank it up to about 1500 RPM (enough to do around 3-4 kts if it weren’t anchored) for a couple of minutes. Monday, it was 2000 RPM (enough to do 4-5 kts) for about 5 minutes. The last step is to connect a lifting hook to the chain with two ropes, both to take the load of the anchor off the windlass and to use the stretchiness of the rope (you wouldn’t think that 3/4″ nylon braid would stretch, would you?) to absorb shock loads.