What Do You Mean It's 3am & The Anchor's Dragging?

Black Wednesday

I mean black because it was pitch black when we began sailing: at 3am, after a restless and fitful sleep worrying about the anchor, Jamie's worst nightmare came true as he realized we were drifting towards the rocks...

After a somewhat rude awakening from my blissful and ignorant carefree sleep I was up on deck hauling anchor while Jamie steered us to safety. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts at re-anchoring we realized we had a choice - either we motored round and round the harbour till dawn or we headed out to sea...

Naturally I was up for motoring round and round, but Jamie is skipper so we headed out to sea. I can safely say that it was one of the most frightening moments of my life as I steered the yacht away while Jamie shouted navigational instructions from below. The compass light didn't work so I had to rely on a digital display which was wildly throwing out all manner of degrees, which varied enormously from moment to moment.

Still I had total faith in the skipper, even when we seemed to be heading straight for rocks (it turned out later that our GPS reading was out by a few degrees and needed recalibrating). Despite the lack of preparation we did a pretty good job and Jamie gave me lots of encouragement to get over the nerves.

The stretch of water between Gümüslük and Yalikavak

As we headed into Yalikavak the sun came up and an immense feeling of peace settled on both of us. We anchored up warily and then fell into a lovely comfortable sleep.

Aft cabin showing Al's oil painting of Bodrum sunset