Anchors Away!

Thursday 17th June
So the plan had been to sail yesterday, but like so many unplanned things that happen on a boat, we didn't. When attempting to bring up the anchor it refused to move, the winch was churning away spinning but the chain remained unmoved. I lowered it again just a little and tried again to bring it back up, while Bob shifted the boats position, but nothing worked and the anchor remained firmly on the bottom. Then to add to my panic the chain started to pull out, I watched helplessly not knowing how to stop it, I could see it was all going to drop to the ocean floor. As luck would have it, the chain stopped pulling just long enough for me to attach the snubber, but at this point I only had about three feet of chain left in the locker. Bob put on his snorkel and swam out over the anchor to see what was preventing it from coming up. The anchor was about 150 feet off the bow and 40 feet down in a sandy bottom, but the chain was wrapped around a rock. Bob had the idea that maneuvering the boat around would free it. Unfortunately the wind had picked up and the boat was pulling hard against the anchor and I was now panicked that the snubber would break, it had a couple of fray's that didn't look as though they would hold a 32 ton vessel. At this point Bob decided to take the winch apart, but without spare parts he was unable to do anything to fix it. Attempting to move the boat around the chain didn't work either, so we decided to bring the anchor up manually using 2 snubbers, attaching one and pulling, then attaching another and pulling, it was a painfully long hard job, that took us over an hour. With blistered hands and sore backs we eventually got the anchor up. OH the joys of boating.