If the answer truly is blowin’ in the wind, then we should be genius by now. Last night there was quite a gale: 45 knots of wind in Barra de Navidad (some boats are reporting they saw 56 knots). North of here, in Banderas Bay, they saw 75 knots.
The wind howled through the crowded anchorage from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. Accompanying it was torrential rain, lightning that crisscrossed across the night sky like a labyrinth, and thunder that growled and roared.
A few boats dragged across the bay, coming within just yards of us and those around us. The soft mud here in the lagoon compromises the tenacity of both anchor and anchor chain. After a boat starts to lose its hold in the mud, it’s just a few seconds before the anchor is no longer set. When that happens the boat turns perpendicular to the wind and gets pushed, sometimes at a three or four knots, across the bay. Last night the two boats that dragged sped through the anchorage–by the time they pulled up all of their anchor chain so they could reset, they were around 600 yards away from where they started.
But we held on all night and didn’t sustain any damage from the dragging boats.
Today the rain continues but the wind is lessening. Every now and then we see gusts into the mid-20s but the worst of it has moved on, visiting boats southeast of where we are. The rain is still torrential, though, and we can barely make out the boats that are right next to us, just a few hundred feet away.
It’s a good day to stay inside and catch up on our movie watching. And if we hear any of those answers, we’ll let you know.
*an addition on 2/12: our friends on Sapphire made a video and posted it on YouTube. Here’s the video:
