Guess who returned to the dinghy dock to find the police waiting for them? Guess who was told their boat dragged anchor across the Phoebus anchorage and was being washed up on the rocks? Guess who had to be pulled off said rocks by the police and game warden boats? And guess who surprisingly has zero damage? Well, other than what I can only assume will develop into a full-blow anxiety issue.
We had the anchor monitor running but the iPad it had (I’ve since swapped it out) been running on was being “weird” and should have been swapped out earlier.
I’ve loved our anchor monitoring system for years, I had picked up an older refurbished iPad (5th generation) and had mounted it up in my bunk. We run some really amazing anchor monitoring software Anchor! And monitor it remotely over the internet.
Well, I’ve had some issues with the software crashing on that old iPad a few times. Specifically, I’d open it up on the screen and it would show an uptime in seconds and not the hours or days that it should have.
The plan was to replace it and well, I got complacent. That complacency almost cost me my boat. Sitting in lunch I checked my phone for the live tracking and it showed the boat safely within the 150 radius of the anchor. However, this was not the case. The boat was dragging, the iPad had dropped the anchor monitoring software and by the time we had made it back to the dingy dock, we’d started to bounce off the rocks.
Luckily the police were able to get us off the rocks and put us back into the anchorage. Despite being lucky, and there being no damage to the boat we are all very shaken up.
There are very large consequences to mistakes made on the water. This is especially true regarding safety equipment such as the very critical anchor monitor.
I recommend the Anchor! Software we have but it’s only as good as the hardware it’s running on, keep an eye on yours, and if you ever start to doubt it. Then it’s time to replace what you’re losing confidence in.
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