Dragging anchor off Lindsay Island

This past long weekend we had an incident that was not much fun on the last night.  We were anchored between Lindsay Island and McDonald Island in the Admiralty Islands outside of Gananoque when at 3 am we dragged our anchor.

We anchored at about noon hour on the Sunday and saw that some other boats from Collins Bay were already there.  One of the boats was close by and one and we said hello to each other.  The other boat said they had moved to this spot for deeper water as they had been on the other side of Lindsay Island the previous night.  We were thinking we were in a good spot and had set well when we got the anchor down.

All seemed good during the afternoon and evening.  But with the weather and wind and motion I could not really rest below.  So I had been doing anchor watch in the cockpit keeping on top of our position.  Sharron had popped up and we had been watching some other boats in the anchorage motoring around.  We were talking about why they were doing that and I figured they had dragged and were maneuvering to find a new spot or simply waiting out the weather before trying while we were comfortable with our “hold”!  Sharron had gone back below to try and sleep.  We figured worst was going be done around 1 am.  Then around 3 am suddenly I am noticing we are not where we should be relative to other boats and we are dragging!  I roused Sharron from sleeping below and we sprang to action.   We came out fine as I could get the anchor up with Sharron on the helm.  It was quite a bit of struggle with the anchor rode and I was worried about overrunning it and fowling the prop.  With the anchor up we had done well as we had also not fowled anybody else’s anchor or run aground.   We tried several times to get on the hook again.  We circled to gauge position which was not as easy in the dark with the wind howling.  I would put the anchor out but we would just not get it set.   It was on our 3rd attempt in some shallower water that we got a good hold and could rest a bit.   Once we could see that we had some good swing we stopped the engine.  I stayed up all rest of the night to monitor while Sharron tried to get some rest.

We were certainly not alone that night as there was plenty of goings on.  We heard several boats calling PAN PAN to Prescott coast guard for assistance all around the same time.

This was a first for us.  We have a few times troubles getting set but never dragged like this after being on the hook for 18 hours.  All was good as we got to ride out the last of the heavy winds through the rest of the night.

We were so happy to have managed to keep ourselves and Sundog safe and undamaged during this.  Not only us but also the other boats near to us as we did not drift into them nor caught up their anchor rodes and end up dragging them too.

Here is a picture from the chart plotter of what our track looked like from the circling and trying to get re-anchored.