Again with the Anchor Windlass!?

When leaving the dock at the village in Makemo, we had a little bit of drama… we had bow anchor down and were stern tied to the wharf and good fortune had it such that the wind was blowing dead astern, so theoretically it would be an easy departure.  Throw off the dock lines (we had help on the dock for that) and then just get pushed by the wind over the anchor as we raise it.  No problem, right?  Well, Alex wasn’t being quite as careful as he should have been, and he jammed the anchor bridal hook up against the bow roller and the windlass fuse blew.  I’m at the helm, and Tim tells me we have to raise the anchor manually, so “just hold us right here.”  Well, some might think that with two engines holding Exodus in precisely one spot would be easy.  And it is, in very light wind conditions.  But with huge windage and very little keel, once the wind is over about 8 kts we get pushed around pretty good.  And this day it was blowing 15-20.  So, I try my best, but we do end up getting blown sideways a bit, so my great idea is to just turn, drive back to line we were on, and then face the anchor again.  In the process of doing that, I wrapped the chain around a coral head.  What a fiasco.  Tim had to jump in the water to free the chain, and at this point I just turned us around to face the wind so once free of the coral head we just floated back bow to the wind and raised the anchor manually (with help from Steve from Lady Carolina who had jumped in the water and boarded Exodus) in a more normal wind orientation for anchor raising.  So, I was ready for my rum right there, but we still had 3 hours of navigating through the coral heads to the next anchorage.  I dipped into the Zaya for that safe arrival cocktail, to be sure!

There is actually a breaker switch for the anchor windlass, but if you recall, that failed on us while we were still in Mexico, and Steve and Tim rigged up a “fuse monster” so that we could operate the windlass while still having the protection not to overdrive the windlass.  This incident in Makemo highlighted a problem with fuses. When they blow, they need to be replaced, but if we had a functioning breaker switch, we could have just thrown the switch and been back in business.  It turns out we actually DID have a replacement breaker switch, and we had had it for quite a while, we just hadn’t gotten around to replacing it.  Needless to say, that jumped up immediately to the top of Tim’s to do list.