Isla Carmen, Puerto Ballandra

April 28, 2018
Puerto Ballandra gave us a a picturesque and calm anchorage. We’re moving north pretty fast and we’ve been lucky to have such benign weather. While we wish we could spend more time in these anchorages at least we’ve seen them and are comfortable the particulars of each.
We have to give a shout out to the Manson Supreme anchor. Although the last few days have been calm, we rely on this great anchor every night to keep us safe.
We usually look to anchor in 2-4 fathoms and almost always with 125-150′ of chain out. Anchoring scope of a 6:1 ratio is pretty standard for us and we’ll up it to 7-8:1 if the winds are predicted to pick up.
Our technique that we perfected years ago to ensure that the anchor has dug in is this; we find our spot, cautious of lee shores. I take the helm while Jess at the bow, prepares the anchor to go over. We can carry on a normal conversation due to our wireless Bluetooth Sena headsets purchased from Cruising Solutions.
As we approach our spot, into the wind, I stop the boat and slowly begin backing up. Jess will pay out the anchor chain, watching the paint on the chain that signals how much has gone out. When we reach the allotted amount, we usually just chill out for a bit giving the anchor a few minutes to dig in.
Then, the important part for us, I back down at 1500rpm and we note the chart plotter and cue’s onshore until we have fully tightened the chain and actually begin to move back forward against the prop thrust. We’ve got a large 75hp motor and we’ve found that using this technique really helps us sleep better at night knowing the anchor is very set.
We’ve proved our technique during many very windy nights at anchor. Even when our boat hunts at anchor and really pulls hard on our ground tackle.
For added piece of mind, I use the Vesper XB-8000 WatchMate anchor alarm connected to my iPhone via wifi. If the wind comes up I can look at where we are in the anchor circle and if we depart the circle, an alarm will sound. A loud obnoxious alarm.
Back to Puerto Ballandra, Chris and Monica aboard s/v Seaglub ( www.seaglub.com ) invited us over for outside movie night! They’ve rigged a large movie screen to their arch and paired with a projector, we all watched the episode finale of Blacksails.

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