The hail heard on the VHF is one no boater wants to hear, Magic Beans is dragging”. Nearly everyone, if they are on board of their vessel, pop their heads out of the companionway hatch to see if they can spot the affected boat. A high percentage of the anchorage who are near enough to spot the boat jump into their dinghies.
There is no coast guard here. Even in the states the Coast Guard, good as they may be, don’t respond this fast. Within seconds the first dinghy arrives with crew who jump aboard the boat that is dragging it’s anchor, yes today it really was a boat called Magic Beans. Within a couple of minutes (at the most) they are joined by a couple more dinghies and in less than 5 minutes the boat is surrounded by dinghies of all sizes and there are more captains than any boat should have.
Even though the boat is relatively close and we can easily see the action we don’t move to leave our boat. We are prepared instead to move our boat should it become necessary. Besides if any more people climb on this little sailboat it might just swamp.
It’s windy today, Chris Parker (the weather guru that nearly every cruiser in the Bahamas listens to has called it a Compression Zone. This term makes the cruisers shutter and put out more scope. It’s an area that is centered between to weather systems, the area between gets squeezed and the wind produced it often very high. That is, in fact. the case today and tomorrow and for the next couple of days we will get wind. It’s supposed to range between 25 and 35 knots, which is quite windy.
Magic Beans dragged anchor and at least a dozen dinghies responded in less than 5 minutes with crew and lines and pushed the offending boat away from the other boats who were still securely anchored but weren’t safe now that there was a boat dragging through the anchorage. In no time they secured the boat and either using engines or dinghy power had the boat turned around and headed back for it’s original spot.
The anchor hauled up and reset someone on the new “crew” donned a mask and snorkel and dove overboard to check the set of the anchor and make certain that the new anchor spot was better than the old one.
Once the boat was re-anchored and all involved were satisfied that the job was done right the crowd of dinghies and make shift crew dispersed and disappeared back into their own boats. All was quite again in the anchorage.