A bit out of chronological order on the posts so I’ll have to backtrack but I’m sitting here on a Tuesday afternoon after the storm hit on Sunday night/Monday morning and it’s still gusting around 27 kts so it’s very much on my mind. It’s always a bit disconcerting being on a heel in an anchorage/ mooring field when a gust hits!
We were in Block Island when we saw that we were going to be expecting over 50 kts in our anchorage so we high tailed it out of there. Spent a night in Cuttyhunk on the way and made it up to New Bedford, MA on Saturday night. We had looked into various safe harbours that weren’t going to be too long a trip and found that New Bedford mooring field was well protected and had the helix style mooring ball anchors (the gold standard of mooring ball anchors). Plus they have hurricane gates that they will close if it’s expected to get extra extra nasty!
The mooring balls up in the Buzzard’s Bay area are quite interesting. They have a pole sticking up from them with an eye at the top for attaching to. This makes them excellent for picking up. The pole is so tall I could just grab it with my hand! The only problem is, if I tried our standard method of hooking up to a mooring ball that we have used in the past, with one line taken from the port bow cleat, through the eye and back and the same on the starboard bow cleat, the lines would rub and chafe against our anchor. Not ideal! Our Anchor is a Rocna 40 (40kg or 88lbs), so we didn’t really want to go through the mission of removing the anchor. What we decided to do instead was route some hefty three strand from the larger center bow cleat, over the secondary bow roller and through the top of the anchor. We were still expecting up to 45 kts gusting though, so having just one line through the mooring pennant had us a bit nervous. We decided to attempt to hash together a backup solution by loosely hooking up our anchoring bridle to the mooring ball by way of shackles. That way if the single line chafed and broke, we had something else we could fall back on. This made us sleep easier on Sunday night and the protected bay meant we had very little fetch.
Yesterday our mooring ball neighbours messaged us to say that our anchoring bridle had become detached from the mooring ball! The pin had come out of the shackle. Oops! That was embarrassing. Kevin had been doing quite the contortionist act in the cold wind and rain to set it up and maybe hadn’t set the pin properly? Who knows! At least it was just the back up and our primary solution was still going very strong so we chose to just pull the bridle back on deck.
The neighbouring boat then had us over for snacks last night since we were all going a little stir crazy not being able to go to shore. As we pushed out from our boat on the dinghy the outboard suddenly cut out (the never ending dinghy propulsion problems of the crew of SV Avion haha)…good thing they weren’t a far paddle away! It was a lovely evening and was nice to have some human interaction.
Hopefully we can successfully get to shore tonight to stretch our legs. Kata is bored!
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