A restless night

We did not get under way this morning.  For one, the weather is not cooperating -- it's blowing 15-20 right now, certainly enough to make it a challenge to keep the boat in a narrow channel.  Moreover, we slept right through what would have been the optimal departure time, owing to the fact that we had a partly sleepless night, due to that same weather.

An integral part of the learning curve with any new boat is developing confidence in your ground tackle.  For us, there is the additional issue of confidence in our anchoring technique.  Last night was our first real test -- up to now, conditions have been mild, to say the least.

One of the negatives mentioned about this spot in several reviews was that there is no protection here from the wind.  And as I wrote earlier, the tidal current here gets up to around four knots.  Last night the leading edge of a line of storms arrived here, and winds quickly built to 15-20 knots with gusts to 30.  For a good part of the night, the winds and current were from opposite directions, making for some interesting boat motion.  Several times I checked on the anchor rode and it was running down from the bow and behind and under the boat, with the snubber/bridle tight against the boat sides.  Every time the boat ran into the chain like this there was a mighty clank; steel boats transmit this kind of sound absolutely everywhere.  Given that the anchor roller hangs only three feet or so beyond where the bow meets the waterline, I'm not sure there is much we can ever do about this, short of adding a longer pulpit.

We've been lying on a little more than 5:1 scope since we arrived.  "Scope" is the ratio of the length of anchor rode to the distance from the bow roller to the seabed at the anchor location.  We calculate that by taking the depth sounder reading where we drop the hook, adding any additional tidal depth from the tide chart, then adding six feet for the distance from the water to the roller.  We selected this spot because the charted depth is 16' MLW, whereas there is a 40' hole just north of us and a 20' hole just south of us.  We confirmed the charts by driving around and reading the depth sounder.

Allowing for tide and pulpit height, we needed to account for about 26' of depth where we dropped anchor, and a 5:1 ratio calls for 130' of rode (including snubber).  That's what we paid out when we arrived.  Now, before I go much further, I should say here that the amount of scope required is dependent on conditions as well as the ground tackle itself, and there is something of a religious debate about it anywhere you look.  One of the more hotly contested topics is whether an all chain rode or a mostly rope rode is better; in our case, the boat came with 400' of all-chain rode, so that's what we use.

While 7/16" regular carbon chain would probably be more than sufficient for a boat of our size, displacement, and windage, we instead have 1/2" high-tensile chain.  In addition to much greater strength, the larger chain is heavier, at over two and a half pounds per foot.  This plays heavily into the scope equation, as the heavier chain will tend to lie flat against the bottom for a much longer distance from the anchor.  The goal is to have the force on the anchor be as nearly horizontal as possible -- any vertical component pulling up on the shank will try to dislodge the anchor from the bottom.

Lots of people will tell you that 7:1 is either the ideal scope or the minimum scope.  Where that number comes from is simple trigonometry coupled with the anchor manufacturers' specifications on the maximum permissible angle between the shank and the bottom for proper holding.  The math works out that the maximum permissible angle will not be exceeded at a 7:1 scope, even if the connection between the shank and the boat is a straight line.  This assumes all the "sag," known as "catenary" (appropriately from the Latin for "chain"), has been pulled taught, a condition many refer to as "bar-tight."    The amount of force required to bring 130', over 330 pounds, of chain bar-tight is considerable and can be calculated.

While I would love to have 7:1 out, which would provide a much greater margin of safety, there are always other realities to contend with.  Here in Price Creek, there is only about 360' total between the six-foot MLW depth countours on either side.  That means that the "shadow" of our rode on the bottom, assuming we precisely set the anchor dead-center, should be at most 180' long.  Otherwise our swing circle could encompass water not deep enough for us.  In light winds, generally the boat will just travel back and forth in a narrow pattern over the anchor as the tidal current reverses.  In high winds, however, all bets are off, and at low slack, even a modest wind can push us to the shoreward edge of that circle and aground.

Since nailing the anchor dead-center is a virtually impossibility, and the anchor may well un-set and re-set itself with every tide change as the rode pulls against the shank in the opposite direction, we need to leave a buffer of at least a boat length on each side, arriving at that 130' number.  Fortunately, 5:1 on our heavy all-chain rode is sufficient in most conditions.

Last night, as the winds increased and the boat started moving more and more erratically, we opted to put out another 25' of scope, bringing us closer to 6:1.  We felt we had a good set near mid-creek, so decreasing our swing buffer was an acceptable tradeoff.  Nevertheless we were quite nervous, and whenever either one of us got up for any reason we went upstairs to check on things.  We also had an anchor alarm set on the iPad with the Drag Queen app, from ActiveCaptain, with a short leash.  It woke us up once, as the current reversed and we bounced to the end of the rode.

Today conditions are even worse, with wind more or less directly across the channel, and we found ourselves inching closer and closer to the lee shore.  Rather than take any chances, we moved the boat, re-dropping the anchor a little closer to the windward shore.  The high winds should let up sometime this evening and we will once again drop closer to center and tighten up the scope a bit.  We'd like to get an early start tomorrow, so I hope we will get some better sleep tonight.  I'm typing this in the pilothouse, so I can keep an eye on the instruments as well.

I did take advantage of yesterday's downtime to get another few things done.  One project was to trace out the wiring to the currently unused aft-deck freezer, which has been nevertheless drawing current to run it's temperature display and heat the lip seal, with no way to turn those off, apparently.  Turning off the breaker also killed the power to the AC receptacles in the pilothouse, where, among other things, the aforementioned iPad is plugged in.  I was finally able to isolate the circuit onto a breaker by itself, so now we can keep that phantom load off.  We're trying to sell the freezer anyway; it's a really nice one, but we'd rather have the space on the aft deck for relaxing and entertaining.

I also spent some time reconciling differences among the four (!) separate voltmeters connected to the house batteries, none of which agreed with my handheld meter.  I was able to recalibrate one of them, but the all-important state-of-charge meter is reading about a volt low, and I need to delve into that one further.  We also spent some time figuring out exactly what else can be shut down to conserve power.  I came up with a plan to keep the essentials, including the iPad, running without the inverter, so we can drop its substantial idle current from the mix, at least overnight, but we opted not to implement it last night, as the iPad anchor alarm is a critical system, and I did not want to impose yet one more systems change on top of an already stressful event stream.

In regards to the failing battery plant, which is necessitating all this detailed power management, long-time reader and fellow bus enthusiast Tom asked why we did not simply transfer the 8D AGM batteries from Odyssey, which I replaced only a couple of years ago, to the boat.  That's a good question which brings up the broader picture of Odyssey's future; one could argue that not only batteries but many other items such as the microwave, TV, inverter, transfer switch, water pump(s), and diesel boiler could just as easily be cannibalized from Odyssey and used on the boat, saving us a few bucks.

As to the batteries specifically, I did consider it, but more from the standpoint of expedience than cost savings.  Ultimately, there were two major reasons that I dismissed this idea very quickly.  The shorter but less important reason had to do with the return on my labor.  Long-time readers will remember that changing the batteries in Odyssey was a major undertaking -- nothing will make you feel like an old man faster than having to manhandle eight 175-lb batteries in a tight crawlspace.  It ended up costing me a bottle of bourbon and a dinner out for the warehouse manager who so generously helped me, in addition to the toll it took on my own body.

Getting batteries in and out of the boat will be no picnic, either, but the working room is a bit less restrictive.  Still, to "trade" batteries between the two would be a very labor-intensive process, and then we'd have batteries on the boat that are nearly two years old, or about halfway through their service life.  Meanwhile, Odyssey would be left with virtually no battery capacity at all.  For the amount of labor involved, I'd rather leave the bus with a half-used bank, and spring the money for a completely fresh set here on Vector.  Of course, that makes no sense until we correct the charging issues that damaged the batteries in the first place, a condition which also would have made short work of whatever was left of the Trojans from Odyssey.

The more important reason speaks to all those other items we could, conceivably, have moved to the boat from the bus.  Chief among those is the inverter, a model no longer available and whose capabilities I will have trouble duplicating here.  Here, the short answer is that this would be tantamount to "parting out" Odyssey.  While that is certainly a viable option, and we considered it (very briefly) when thinking about our options once we moved to the boat, it would really be an admission that the bus held so little value, either to a potential buyer, or even to ourselves for some future use, that it made more sense to scrap it after salvaging what we could.  Devoid of any of the house systems that make it what it is, a 28-year-old empty Neoplan shell has virtually no market value at all.

In fact what we decided is that Odyssey is, indeed, worth a fair amount.  Perhaps we will not succeed in convincing anyone else of that well enough to persuade them to buy it, but it still holds value to us.  So much so that we have budgeted funds to store it and maintain it indefinitely, until such time as we need it again, someone comes along to buy it, or we deem its value to have dropped to a point where the storage no longer makes sense.

Thus, Odyssey will remain fully functional, batteries and all, for the foreseeable future. This will come in handy almost immediately, as we are planning to move back into the bus at the boatyard while Vector is being worked on.  This will allow the workers to remove as much of the stateroom finish and furnishing as necessary to access the bilges, where the real work needs to happen.  Once we are done at the boatyard, we will start to market Odyssey much more aggressively.  As much as we would miss her, I'd much rather see the bus being used regularly by someone who appreciates it than sitting forlornly in a storage yard waiting patiently for her masters to return.  The money would be nice to have in the cruising kitty, too.

Tomorrow the weather will be better and we plan to weigh anchor and get underway at 08:00, which will give us two feet and rising at the mouth of Price Creek, and put us past all the skinny water near McClellanville just before high tide there around 11.  As I am typing these last few lines, another trawler, Slow Churn, has appeared in our heretofore un-shared anchorage, giving us even more reason to be mindful of our scope.  Once the wind and current align this evening, we will re-set the hook closer to channel center, and with winds back down in the 10-15 range, tighten back up to 5:1.