We’ll start this tale with an almost impossible photo of the moon from the deck of a yacht at anchor. There isn’t much light, given the small amount of moon illumination, which means a slow shutter speed necessitating a stable platform. Add in that this is a 500mm lens with a doubler, i.e. the equivalent of 1000mm, and it gets even trickier. The answer lies in an unmarked wreck in the southwest corner of Marathon harbor, where we arrived back at dead low tide. We shall spare you the details of finding the wreck as we scouted for our old anchoring position. The interesting part is what happened after we became ensnared.

We were not initially sure what had us in its grip, but the mashing sounds eminating from the starboard prop indicated it wasn’t just a case of powering off a shoal spot.

We have carried a Fortress aluminum anchor as a kedge for 30+ years. It saw action on Intermezzo on numerous occasions, on Intermezzo ll just a few times, once each on Sundeer and Beowulf, and until this incident, never on Wind Horse. As a result we had become sloppy in the storage of the anchor (surrounded with gear that had to be removed), the short chain with which it is attached to its rode (buried below ventilator cowls), and rode in its turtle bag (three layers down in a pile at the forward end of the forepeak).

15 minutes passed before we had the anchor rigged and ready to deploy. We were in the process of launching the dink when Marja and Steve Vance came by to say hello and offered to set the hook for us. That done, we lead the rode aft to the electric winch and proceeded to tighten things up.

It was soon obvious that we were not going to budge. We tried easing the rode and pushing with the dink to no avail.

With our battery powered spotlight we could see the outlines of a framework which appeared to be hung up on the forward side of the starboard prop at one end and the rudder’s trailing edge at the other.

With only a foot/30cm of tidal range we did not have a lot of hope of floating off and thoughts of underwater plasma cutters were filtering into the dialog.

Which is when we noticed the spectacular moon, dug out the tripod and aforementioned lens, and took a couple of snaps. Credit goes to Marja Vance whose dainty finger was on the remote trigger when these were taken.

We decided to help the meager tidal range by moving fuel forward and to port, and dumping the aft fresh water tank. At 2315 we were pleased to see Wind Horse float free, the combination of a relaxed rode, tide, and trim change having been successful.

Morning inspection showed minor paint dings, and a few scratches on the prop. Today we did a run up through 2200 RPM and the props are still vibration free.

The kedge and its attendant accessories are now together and more easily accessed.