I spent the night and until noon dozing and recuperating from my mis-cooked dinner, Les and Jeremie came by to see how I was doing and even brought me a baguette. For the first time in years I didn’t have a coffee all day, but by late afternoon I felt somewhat better. Dinner consisted of a thick soup eaten with dunked pieces of baguette and that had me feeling a lot better, good enough to consider having a beer and I opened one up around 20:00 and took it topsides but didn’t even have a taste, I knew I wasn’t up for that quite yet. I heard a bit of shouting somewhere and watched a late-arriving boat anchor rather close to me (despite the anchorage being almost empty) when I noticed that Elendil, a blue steel ketch with a Swiss flag was anchored in a different place from where it had been in the morning. A minute later I realized that it had moved backwards with the wind and that the crew of 100 foot Oyster “Penelope” was active since the dragging boat was directly upwind of them!
I got my flashlight out, put on a shirt and zipped over on the dinghy. There were scant few feet separating the drifting vessel and Penelope, which had let out chain to avoid, or at least postpone, a collision and they’d deployed all of their fenders. I banged on the hull of the drifting vessel, which was a mistake as the hull was steel and not fiberglass as my bruised knuckles now testify to, but despite the lights being on aboard the vessel was unoccupied. I knew that my 10HP dinghy wouldn’t do much against a drifting 60 foot steel ketch so asked if a crew member could jump aboard my dinghy and we could board the offender and see if we could get her underway and avoid a noisesome contact. They were deploying their own tender and soon two of us were aboard the ketch. I found the starter button and we managed to raise the anchor, motor forward and reset the anchor – ensuring that it held this time!
I returned to Zanshin and drained the beer overboard as I wasn’t up for it and then watched a movie (#8220;The Big Bang”) and about halfway through the movie I thought that I might drink a Corsaire after all, but after I opened the bottle and took one sip the rest went down the drain and I had just wasted a significant amount of my remaining beer supplies!
 |  |