Why Can 't They Learn To Anchor?

Sloop Cove, Valcour Island
N 44 37.413 W 73 24.417

On Saturday, I got spooked by the weather forecast. I really shouldn't do that because I've been complaining that the forecasts always seem to be wrong this year. Nevertheless, they forecast severe thunderstorms for the afternoon. We were anchored in Sloop Cove with lots of Canadian boats and I didn't want to be near them during a storm.

Therefore, we sailed up the lake to a place called Deep Bay. Deep Bay is part of Point Au Roche NY State Park. They have moorings there and we had to pay $14 to spend the night. Deep Bay must be the best sheltered anchorage on the whole lake and the place to be when a storm comes.

I took the dinghy ashore and walked the nature trails. It was great. I came to a section of huge white pines. It must be an old growth area, one of the very few around. The trees were magnificent and the setting made me feel insignificant. I also came across a deep woods amphitheater. The amphitheater had split logs as benches for the audience and even a log and split log lectern. A plaque nearby commemorated the memory of Camp Red Cloud and Camp Red Wing. It must have been a great location
for a camp.

The thunderstorms missed us, passing both north and south of us. Just as well. We've seen enough of them. The next morning we sailed to Plattsburg for a pump out and then sailed back to Valcour. Both Saturday and Sunday were grey overcast days, but the winds at 10-15 knots made for excellent sailing conditions. I realized that our thinking about sailing has become too rigid. We either sail from point A to point B, where B is a destination, or we have guests onboard and sail from point A and
return to point A. The problem is that some days we don't have guests and don't have a destination to go to, but are nevertheless fine days for a day sail. It it the busman's holiday syndrome. I resolve to resist that thinking. When the weather and location is nice it's a delight to just sail even if we have no destination and no guests.

I don't mean to pick on Canadians, but the anchoring practices of the Quebec flagged boats appalls me. I'm sure that they must have seamanship training in Canada as good as anywhere else. Still, the Canadians around here seem to have no knowledge of scope. For the sake of landlubbers, I'll explain. Scope is the ratio of anchor line (and/or chain) to the depth of water. Anchors are designed to pull out easily when pulled from above, but to never pull loose when pulled horizontally. The more
the scope, the more the pull approaches horizontal. Three-to-one (3:1) is the minimum scope. We usually use 5:1 as our standard scope and increase that to 7:1 in adverse conditions. Of course, the larger the scope the bigger the radius of the circle one swings in. In a crowded anchorage, the trick is to let out enough scope to hold securely but not too much scope lest one bump against the other boats.

The Canadians from Quebec amazingly seem to be happy with a scope of only 2:1 or less. Yesterday, we watched a big expensive sail boat from Quebec try to anchor next to us. He had a yellow float on his anchor so it was easy to see where it was. He was trying to anchor in water 30-40 feet deep. We were next to him. We dropped anchor in 18 feet of water and let out 100 feet of scope. The Becer (local slang for Quebecers) tried four times. Four times he let out a scope of about 1.5:1. The yellow
float was only about 15 feed in front of his bow. Four times it dragged. Finally, he gave up and went away. His behavior seems typical among the Becers we see around here. Most, but not all, of them use far too little scope to be secure. We have no idea why their seamanship is deficient in this particular. That's why I don't want to share a crowded anchorage with Becers in a storm. It would be chaos.