In our three years of cruising, we’ve never dragged after our anchor has been properly set. Occasionally we have dragged the anchor while in the process of getting it to set, but once set, having backed down with both engines at 1500 rpm, we’ve never had a problem. We’re fairly conservative, put out more anchor chain than strictly necessary, and never leave the boat for longer periods of time until we’ve been safely anchored for at least a day. Using this process, we’ve seen more than 40 knots while on anchor and never dragged. Not once. 

Today, unfortunately, has proven to be the exception. We’ve been anchored in a lovely harbor for three days now, in a variety of wind conditions. This morning, it was blowing up to 15 knots, the most wind we’ve yet seen in this anchorage, but nothing concerning. By early-afternoon, the wind died to 7-10 knots, around the time we decided to head into shore and spend the afternoon on the beach with our kid boat buddies, Ayla. Normally, I’d stay on the boat to work on the newsletter, but the nice, shaded beach bar has WIFI, so I figured I’d join the troops ashore. 

Not two hours later, a fellow cruiser dinghied to shore, at pace, to let us know that our boat was dragging into Ayla. From our angle on shore, the boats looked no closer than they had been over the last three days, but Brian jumped into our dinghy with Robert, from Ayla, to go check out the situation. Before long, I could see Robert on our bow, upping anchor. Uh oh…

Once they had re-anchored the boat and come back to shore, they told us that Atlas was mere feet away from Ayla when they arrived. Yikes! Crisis averted only because of another cruiser keeping an eye out and the fact that we weren’t on any kind of lengthy adventure inland. This led to a bit of an anxious debrief, though, between Brian and I. Why did this happen? And more importantly, what could we have done differently? 

We have a Rocna anchor, which is the same type of anchor we had for seven years on our monohull on Lake Ontario—just bigger on this boat. We’ve been very happy with the Rocna on both boats. The one critique that we’ve read, but never experienced, is that it occasionally has trouble re-setting in mud if the direction of the wind changes dramatically. Our only guess is that is what happened in this situation. This morning, when the wind was stronger, it was blowing about 180 degrees from where it ended up blowing this afternoon. Even though the wind had lightened quite a bit, we’re surmising that it didn’t reset and then started dragging through the soft mud as the afternoon went on. While the distance it dragged wasn’t far, we had 67 meters of chain out in 12 meters of depth, it was enough for our boat to be seconds from hitting the other boat. 

The anchorages here in Madagascar are tricky as the wind changes 180 degrees on a regular basis from morning to afternoon (just generally not as strong as we saw today), combined with a large tidal range and some strong currents. So what to do now? Going forward our plan is to repeat our back down when the wind direction has changed combined with increased velocity—and perhaps, just simply back down again every couple days when we’ve been anchored in one place for several days. Another part of the adventure and one we’re grateful ended up the way it di