Anchor Adventure

In my flying days, we used to have a saying that the most dangerous time to climb into my F33 Bonanza was just after somebody else worked on it. That is one reason that my good friend, who was a certified A and P guy, and I did our own annual inspections and most of the work on the plane.

The wisdom of this was brought home to me on one particular occasion when I had flown to Columbus to have some avionics work done. When the work was complete, a friend flew me back to Columbus, I tested the avionics and found them to be in order and got my clearances to head back to Pittsburgh. Shortly after take off, the cockpit filled with smoke along with an intense electrical smell. A fire in flight is a certain death sentence. I quickly shut off everything electrical except one radio, contacted Columbus tower, declared an emergency and requested immediate permission to land. They gave me permission to land down wind (not a problem on a 10000 foot runway) and scrambled the fire brigade. Long story short, the smoke dissipated with the electrics shut down and I made a normal landing. Back at the avionics repair facility, it was determined that someone had gotten too ambitious with the solvent used to clean the circuit boards and the latent solvent had boiled off as the electronics heated up.

At the end of last year, I asked Ian (our Captain) to pull all the chain out of the chain locker on Iron Lady, make sure all the twists and kinks that accumulate over the course of a cruising season were out, re-stow it and secure the bitter end with a short length of line. I have always done this so the line could be cut and the chain dumped overboard in the event of an emergency – much easier to cut thru a bit of line then high strength chain.

I never inspected the work and, unknown to me, Ian had used a 10 foot piece of Spectra to secure the bitter end. Two problems with this. The first being that Spectra line is most difficult to cut which defeats the purpose of being able to easily cut the line in an emergency. The second being that 10 feet of line is way too much and the line becomes tangled up in the chain.

When we anchored in Half Moon Bay off Oban in Stuart, the holding was not the best so we put out extra chain. Enough extra that the Spectra line was dragged up with the chain and lodged in the hawse pipe and windlass effectively jamming everything. We could neither let out or bring in the chain.

The exercise to clear things involved securing the chain after the windlass so nobody would lose their fingers, removing the pipe that feeds the chain from the chain locker to the windlass, using the other foredeck windlass to generate enough slack in the chain to remove it from the chain gypsy, gradually free the line working on it from both above and below decks and when we finally had enough freedom on the chain, put the chain back on the gypsy and jog it slowly to feed out the remainder of the jammed line.

This could have been fairly serious if the anchor had not held during the time it took to clear things. Fortunately, it did.