The Great Wander

When you are in one place for a long period of time, you get accustomed to things.  I don’t want to say comfortable, but almost complacent.  You know the routine of how things work and the coming and going of things.  That’s a feeling I had in every house I owned and it was no different being at the dock.

As a family we knew our neighbors, we had our routines.  We knew how to do laundry and how to maintain our power onboard (ok that was easy, you just left the shore power cable plugged in).  Things were familiar and we were…well accustomed to it all.  

When we got to anchor, even though it was only half a mile down river, that changed.  Now we had to figure out power.  How were we going to get laundry done? We have a washer on board, but now we must get out the generator and run that to run the washer.  Can we run the hot water kettle in the morning for coffee or do I need to boil it on the stove?   How do you deal with cloudy days when your primary source of battery charging is solar?  These are all questions that we needed to figure out.

We also needed to figure out where to drop our anchor and how does this anchor alarm app on the phone work?   There are lots of things that are different at anchor than being at the dock.  We never wanted our boat to be a dock princess.  Now’s the time to make sure that didn’t happen, so we headed downriver a little way to start to learn what it means to live “On the Hook”.

Leaving the dock was relatively easy.  I won’t say it’s routine, but we do have things figured out.  Timing the departure, putting lines away.  Watching the current.  We’re getting pretty good at that.

Once we left the marina, we headed to where we knew we were going drop anchor.  Once we got to the anchorage, we needed to pick a spot to drop the anchor.  There are several considerations when dropping anchor, but most of that came back to us pretty quickly from our time in the San Juan Islands.  Once we were happy with how the anchor was set, it was time to get the boat ready for being at anchor.

Getting the boat ready for being at anchor really means getting stuff out and putting stuff away.  There’s also some power management that goes on, like making sure the water heater is turned off.  Turning off electronics that aren’t necessary.

As we settled in for our first day and night at anchor, I realized I have two major concerns: the anchor alarm and power management.

Anchor alarms are great apps that use the GPS on your phone to make sure that your boat doesn’t move outside of a circle around the anchor.  The goal is to set the anchor alarm when your anchor hits the bottom and then you add in how much chain you let out.  When visibility is bad because of a storm, you might not be able to tell if your anchor is dragging if you don’t have any reference points.

Monitoring the status of the batteries is important.  Some things need to be on almost all of the time, so the batteries are always providing some power.  If the sun isn’t out, then we need to figure out how long we can go before we have to run the engines to charge the batteries.

We mostly have the anchor alarms figured out, each of us have a different one on our phones for back up. Power management is a little more in flux because days are different, power draws are different, there’s some variability in the usage there.  

Even though we didn’t go far, being at anchor was very enjoyable.  The boat swings with the wind and the tide, so you typically have a breeze flowing through the cabins.  This part of the river is a little nicer to get into to cool off and you don’t have the heat of the dock radiating to the boat.  You also just have some different views, all throughout the day. In the near future, we will be moving a little further down river to change views again.  I imagine we will be back where we currently are for a little bit, but as we get more comfortable with things, we will be venturing further away from the familiarity of the dock.