Alone at anchor and a new dinghy

March 23, 2024

How calm is this anchorage

Mandy went back the uk to work and left me on anchor alone for the first time. It was for six nights and the first three I had crazy 30, gusting to 40 knot winds. The anchor dragged twice and I had to re anchor alone. Another first. I caught the first drag on video, I hate that noise, makes me jump out of my skin every time. You can see the wind speed on the display on the right.

As they say every day is a school day and I learned quite a bit about anchoring on my own with 3 days of big winds. Then they died and I could go ashore to collect my new solar panel from my favourite diy store, Leroy Merlin. It was a 30 minute walk carrying my solar panel in the hot sun. Then I got it in the dinghy and was happily tootling back to the boat when I decided to try and video my journey. Took my eye off the ball and hit a rock with the outboard and snapped the shear pin on the propeller. That's what you get for trying to be a vlogger.

So I had to row back against the wind. I was doing about 1 metre per minute when the rollock snapped off and my speed dropped to about 1 metre per hour. It was exhausting. Then out of the blue hippie Mike from Birmingham, another liveaboard in the anchorage, came to my rescue and towed me back to the boat. I insisted he come aboard for a couple of beers and we had a great chat for a few hours. He's headed to the Canaries where I hope we'll meet up again.

Now we have 730 watts of solar and a working watermaker so will not need to go into expensive marinas as much. I had quite an adventure on my own at anchor. Also got loads of jobs done. Then Mandy returned, much to my relief. She brought with her a massive bag of goodies, most importantly another of Jenny's fruit cakes. What are we going to do when we get to the Caribbean, those cakes have become part of our diet?

Our friends Paul & Opel put us on to a guy selling a dinghy. Our little Zodiac is brilliant (Jacques Cousteau drove a Zodiac) but does not have a hard bottom and is a little small. Also the engine is not powerful enough to get up on the plane which you need in the Caribbean as many of the anchorages are a long way off the coast. So this new dinghy is 10 foot long, the Zodiac is 8 foot, it has a hard bottom and comes with an amazing Yamaha 15 horsepower 2 stroke outboard. So we bought it. Now we have a backup dinghy and outboard. The new dinghy had been left in the water for a long time so needed a real good clean so we took it to the beach to scrape the barnacles off. It didn't take as long as we thought but we both got sunburnt backs.

Another skill Mandy has learned is making soft shackles out of Dyneema. These are brilliant because they are just as strong, much quieter and cheaper than steel shackles. They also don't fail catastrophically, steel shackles explode when they break.

I was replacing all the 12v instrument lights with LEDs. One of the bulbs was wired negative to the tip which caused the dimmer transistor to burn out and cause lots of scary smoke from the wiring cupboard. All was ok though, all I need is a new TIP142 transistor for a couple of quid. There's nothing like the smell of burning semi-conductors in the morning.

We went to the massive Friday market in Torrevieja with the rest of Spain and bought a shed load of cheap, fresh food. 1€ for a giant bag of spinach, 1€ for a giant bag of coriander, 1€ for 2 broccolis', tomatos, mushrooms and some lovely strong fresh jalapenos. As well as some deliciously healthy pistachio cream filled croissants.