Had an interesting night last night… anchored in Isla San Francisco. We were all ‘weathered up’ with information as to which way to expect the wind… and we’d studied the guide books and charts carefully… knew exactly where we were going to drop the hook. It’s a beautiful bay with lots of options and, to our amazement, it was empty when we arrived…so we could drop our hook absolutely anywhere…. Yikes, that’s a lot of choices! Anyway, just before arriving we’d been conversing with another boat on the VHF and didn’t they have yet another source for weather info. and didn’t their source disagree with ours as to where the winds would come from over-night. So what did we do? Of course… we quickly changed our plans and anchored according to this new information, completely disregarding all the info. we’d carefully collected.
I gotta say, these anchorages are not like those we’re accustomed to in BC. At home, we don’t even consider anchoring unless there is almost complete protection from almost every direction and then, only if there’s enough room for a good ‘swing’. Here, there is no such thing. Your choices range from ‘not at all’ to one end or the other of the anchorage for protection from the wind in one, maybe two, directions… but definitely not all. So yesterday, armed with the latest info. we chose to anchor at the south end of the bay in a much shallower area but somewhat protected from south winds by a small hook. Over-night, we did indeed start with a bit of the south wind predicted, but at 0200 hrs. the north wind (as predicted by our sources) arrived like a freight-train (it does that you know, you suddenly hear a roar and then in it comes) and stayed with us until 0730 hrs. when it stopped just as abruptly. The most wind we saw was 22 knots and we had quite a bit of wave action to go with it. Our trusty ground tackle held well and even though we saw 13’ at the shallowest, we never moved back… just up and down.
We’re having coffee now and the sun is finally up warming our cold feet and bruised egos :-) Very shortly we’ll leave and head over to San Evaristo for a few days of good protection from the ‘northers’ that are supposed to start tonight (our info). It has a small village with a school and we have some school supplies for the children…. oh yeah, and we’re low on beer :-) Bye for now. Will talk later. CJ
PS: Ironically one of the boats that anchored on the other side, where we’d meant to go, just moved over and anchored beside us. Maybe their ride wasn’t as smooth as it looked (the grass is always greener… even in the Sea).
