Anse Mitan, Martinique

Will the excitement never end? This morning we were still anchored over in Fort de France. I was down in the bunk still half asleep when Kevin shouts down, "Hey Amanda, are you awake?". I said, "Yeah, why?". "Because I'm going to blast the air horn in a second here and I just wanted to warn you." Ah, our good old trusty air horn, what would we do without it? "Wings", a sixty-foot boat that had been anchored several hundred feet in front of us, was now somehow forty feet behind us and moving away fast. No one onboard responded to the air horn because there was no one onboard. The thing was heading into deeper water and if someone didn't do something soon we knew it would drift merrily off on its way to Central America.

It was just luck that Kevin happened to stop reading and go upstairs to look around. It was also luck that "Wings" didn't hit us or catch our anchor chain. However, Kevin could see that there were several other cruisers just sitting in their cockpits watching "Wings" take flight and doing nothing about it. No air horn or shouts to warn us as it passed our boat, no nothing. But then again maybe they were hailing us on the VHF, which we did not have on, so I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt. Anyway we lowered the dinghy and sped over. A French cruiser whose boat had also miraculously been spared being hit by "Wings" also came out in his dinghy. The first thing was to let out more chain, hoping that the anchor would catch and stop the boat from dragging further. Kevin and the French cruiser did that while I tried to figure out how to start the engine. The guys got the boat to stop dragging just before it got to the deep ferry channel. Once the boat had stopped dragging, the French guy dinghied back to his boat while Kevin tried to help me figure out the ignition. Our boat starts like a car: turn the key and the engine cranks. This one was a much fancier boat -- we could see switches for the bow thruster, the electric winches, the various electronic equipment, but no key or obvious way to start the darn thing. There were three mysterious black buttons, all labeled "Push", and two unlabeled choke-type pull switches that looked promising. But pushing the buttons in various sequences (and all together) and pulling the levers produced nothing. We could not hear any engine crank or anything.

But at least the boat wasn't dragging anymore, so while I stayed aboard "Wings" Kevin dinghied back to our boat to get our handheld VHF (and a bra, since I had literally jumped out of bed and into the dinghy while in my pajamas). He also stopped by a French boat who issued a security notice on the VHF to warn the ferries (who were passing pretty darn close to "Wings" and waking the heck out of us). While he was talking to the French boat, an American dinghied up and offered to go ashore to look for the owners. Kevin came back to "Wings" and we decided to just stay with the boat and wait til the owners arrived. About half an hour later a dinghy raced from the dinghy dock and it was the hired captain, who thanked us profusely for stopping the boat and "saving his job". Apparently he dropped the owners off ashore and then went to clear in at customs, where someone told him that his boat was dragging. Since the winds were gusting up to 30 knots, Kevin offered to help him re-anchor. We were both pretty surprised that the guy (Greg or Gary, didn't catch the name) wanted to anchor in exactly the same place. That made no sense; if you know your boat didn't hold why would you pick the same spot? We didn't say anything but it was a really odd choice. The anchor got set and Kevin and I returned to "Solstice". In a few minutes he dinghied up with a bottle of Australian wine and thanked us again for saving the boat and his job. THEN he casually mentioned that he wasn't even going to tell the owners about how the boat had dragged and that if the owner noticed that they weren't in quite the same spot he would tell them, "well the boat dragged a little but I re-anchored". So THAT'S why he wanted to drop the hook in the same spot!

Now, he may have been joking and honestly, I hope he was. But as a boat OWNER, for him to joke about deceiving other boat owners after the serious situation their boat had just been through, well that didn't sit right with me. He wasn't kidding about us saving his job -- the holding in the anchorage was excellent and the boat had a huge delta anchor, so the only reason it dragged was that he hadn't put out enough scope and he probably didn't back down on it (he didn't back down when we helped him, either). The owners of that boat will never realize just how serious the situation was -- their million-dollar boat was truly drifting into the ferry and shipping lanes, and it was also bearing down on an 8-foot-tall metal channel marker. So it's possible that he didn't want to say anything to the owners of "Wings" in order to keep his job. But we didn't do what we did to save his job. We did it because we saw a boat in trouble and others have done exactly the same for us. It's too bad we didn't have a chance to run into the owners before we left the anchorage, we would've told them the story of how we were saved from dragging in Luperon and that it happens to everyone. So if anyone runs across a beautiful, blue-hulled, sixty (or so) foot monohull called "Wings" from Seattle (bound for Antigua), tell them we say hello and that Kevin says, "You don't need to have a professional captain to drag anchor, we've managed to do it all by ourselves!"

Where we are:
Location= Anse Mitan, Martinique
Lat=14 33.655
Lon=61 03.175