Charts Part 2

Charts, Part 2

When you sail on the ocean, you use charts to figure out where you are. This is because often you can’t just LOOK and see where you are! An earlier post called “Charts’ covered the basics of this subject.

Now I’m in the Marquesas Islands, I’m alone on Spice, my 37-foot SeaRunner trimaran (my crewman Ron decided to not continue on “around the world”, and flew back to Tomales Bay, where we departed from 4 months previously). My friends Chuck and Nancy Raymond (nee Mosk) on their 42-foot wooden boat, Tyone, had sailed up the day before to anchor in a protected bay on the north side of the island named Baie Hiva. I was going to join them, but had had to get some odds and ends sorted out on the boat, so I sailed up the next day.

Trying to catch some fish trolling near the north-east point on the island, Cap Matautoa, I’d gotten into the wind shadow near the cliffs and lost the wind. I cranked up my trusty 6-hp diesel to straighten out the lines and get the boat away from the wind shadow of the cliffs, and back out where she could be a sailboat again. I put the engine into gear, immediately got caught aback, and wrapped my fishing lines around my prop.

That’s a whole ‘nother story, which I’ll tell later in these chronicles. But suffice to say I got the lines cut off, motored out of the wind shadow, and sailed over to Baie Hiva, two bays over. Because I’d started late in the day, and had lost some time to the fishing line adventure, I got into the Bay just barely able to see the coastline. Then it went dead calm, so I dropped the sails and motored slowly into the Bay. I’d consulted the chart for the area first, of course, and it showed a fairly deep bay with no outlying coral heads or islets. I could still see well in the starlight, so I felt fairly safe.

I scanned the bay for Tyone, but couldn’t make out anything. They obviously didn’t have any lights on, or I’d have been able to see them. I didn't want to turn on my million-candlepower searchlight, because then I'd be night-blind for a half hour. Oh well, see them in the morning; all I needed was to make sure I didn’t run into them on the way to anchoring Spice, and I could see well enough in the starlight to make out a boat 100 feet ahead.

I made for the west end of the bay, watching my depth sounder (absolutely necessary for piloting with charts!), and when the sounder showed that the water was 30 feet deep, and I could see in the starlight that I was still about a quarter-mile from the beach, I dropped the hook and let out all 200 feet of chain.

“The hook” was a 35-pound CQR plow anchor on 200 feet of 5/16” BBB chain; my experience with it thus far indicated it would hook into anything and hold the boat in up to 60 knots of wind. The chain meant that it could drag over coral heads without getting cut and setting the boat adrift; something that was absolutely necessary if you were cruising any where in coral country!

I pitched my bright yellow 9-foot dinghy over the side, tied it to a deck cleat, then let it out to the full extent of its 30-foot painter (dinghy bow rope to you non-sailors) and settled down for a good night’s sleep in a protected harbor. I had the 30-foot painter on the dinghy so that when the night went calm, the dinghy didn’t snuggle up against the boat and go bump-bump-bump, which woke me up unnecessarily. The wind was blowing towards that beach a quarter mile away, so our stern was pointed towards the beach. Still in 25 feet of water according to the depth sounder; still plenty far from the beach, right?

Early the next morning, sun just up, I was woken by a thunk-thunk-thunk. I jumped up to see, because this was not a usual noise on my boat. What I saw when I looked behind the boat was the dinghy, going thunk-thunk-thunk up and down in the little 6-inch wind chop inside the bay, on a reef that was barely 6 inches underwater. That was 20 feet behind the boat, because it extended out a quarter mile from the beach. And even though I’d anchored a quarter mile “from the beach”, I’d barely anchored 20 feet away from the reef once we’d swung around in the light night wind.

Well, at least we weren’t ON the reef! And that 20 feet was just barely enough for me to feel comfortable and not have to move and re-anchor right away. I gave thanks, pulled the dinghy in so it wasn’t thunking on the reef, scanned the bay for Chuck and Nancy’s boat, and found it about a half mile to the east.

The kicker? “The chart” hadn’t shown any shallow areas in that part of the bay; just deep all the way in the the beach. The lesson? Charts were made by people, are not Gospel truth, contain mistakes, and need to be used with caution. God guided my hand and protected me this time.

Fair Winds And Following Seas, Tim