0430 hours, March 2, 2015, White House Bay, St. Kitts: We were awoke by 45 nmph wind gusts. I could see the strength of the wind from the B&G wind monitor in our cabin, but scrambled to the pilot house to see our anchor position. I set the anchor position on my Simrad chart plotter when I drop the anchor. The trail feature provides a pattern of where we have swung, shows the boats current position, and provides a measurement from where the anchor was dropped to where we currently sitting. Although we were at the far edge of the anchor pattern we had not drug. I use the Pythagorean Theorem to calculate what the distance should be, knowing the amount of chain I have let out and the death of the water and the height of my bow above the water. As I almost always use a 5 to 1 scope or greater (in this case 6.45 to 1), the horizontal distance is not much less than the length of deployed chain. In this case the deployed chain was 200 ft. and the calculated horizontal distance is 197 ft.
I next checked the bridle and it's snubbers. Both snubbers had sheared and nylon bridle had stretched significantly almost depleting the the 3 ft. of chain I had looped over the chain grabber at the end of the bridle.
We have a 132 lb Ultra anchor and before the trip I upgraded from 3/8" to 1/2" high test chain. We have never drug and the only times we have had to reset the anchor is when I misjudged the swing with respect to other boats or obstacles. The chain grabber and the bridle/ snubber system were also purchased from Quickline who I had purchased the Ultra anchor from. After a couple of rounds of e-mails with Quickline we decided to upgrade the bridle from 3/4" to 1" line and use a correspondingly larger snubber. Fortunately I had the material on board to make up the bridle.
We continued to get gusts as high as 45 nmph during the day. The gusts were directly offshore and as we were no more than 1000 ft. from the shore, there was very little rolling. We would be in White House Bay for a total of 10 days, and two more in Nevis, waiting for the winds to drop below 20 nmph and the seas to get down to 6 ft.
While we waited out the wind many large boats came and left. I tracked the departure of a 138 ft. sloop on AIS as they went around St. Kitts on a track to St. Barth. I called them on VHF once they were away from the Island and asked them about the condition if the seas. They simply reported "awful". Buoy Weather had forecasted the seas that day to be from the east (the course to St. Barth is NNE) at 10' with an 9 second interval. This confirmed what I had thought, the folks leaving in bigger boats didn't know something I was unaware, but had schedules to keep and were forced to take on "awful" conditions. Other boats that came and went included Rising Sun, and Rosehearty. Rising Sun, which is 453 ft. and has 48,000 hp, was built for Larry Ellison CEO of Oracle and owner of the franchise that just won the America's Cup. A couple of years ago Ellison sold Rising Sun to David Geffen, the third partners and founder of DreamWorks, along with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. We had also seen Rising Sun in North Sound between Christmas and New Years. Rosehearty is a 170 Perini Navi ketch owned, or previously owned (understand it was for sale a year ago), by Ruper Murdoch. Murdoch is CEO and Chairman of the worlds second largest media conglomerate, News Corp.
White House & Ballast Bay Nevis behind
Rising Sun
Rosehearty
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