Boating Safety Tips, Tricks & Thoughts from Captnmike

Recently Seattle Singles Yacht Club honored me with Skipper Emeritus Award for my contributions to boating, sailing, boating safety, member education and taking many many people sailing over more than 20 years and over 1,000 trips, sometimes up to 80 or 90 trips a year.

They had a nice Zoom meeting and several people shared stories of their good experiences on my boats or of times that I went the extra mile to help someone with a boating question or problem. I was also presented with a nicely bound book of stories, I have scanned it and the link is below.

Over the years I contributed in many ways. I taught something over 300 “mini-classes” at the end of the meeting. Some of the classes were “simple” such as how to tie a fender or How to Tie a Bowline, How to Tie a Spilled Hitch Bowline, How to Tie a Bowline with Your Left Hand, others like Rules of The Road were more involved and took extra time. I am quite proud to have passed on a bit of information to many people and made their on the water safer or easier.

A friend recently sent me a link to a very interesting article on anchoring. Includes a ton of information about deep water and heavy weather anchoring, there are a ton of links for more information from types of anchors to use (or not use) and a lively comment section with questions answered and feedback from readers.

One bit of caution the article is a little long so you might want to go over the information presented and come back and digest the information slowly.

Background: 

Denali Rose is 50 ft. LOA and displaces 22+ tons cruising weight. We typically frequent deeper anchorages above 56°N. [e.g., We anchor in 50 to 90 ft. of water about 80% of the time, with the remaining 20% spent at anchor in 30-50 ft.]

We adhere to the philosophy of setting one recent generation [AKA ‘Modern’] oversized anchor and sleeping well…

This is the 20th Anniversary of September `11, 2001 when planes crashed in the World Trade Center, What is not known is how 500,000 people were taken off Lower Manhattan Island by a volunteer flotilla of boats that just showed up to help the refugees / commuters from the tower collapse.

The Coast Guard put out a request for vessels to help evacuate people from Lower Manhattan, in response a motley mix of tugs, tour boats, ferries and others came steaming over the horizon to help. Sometimes the dust from the towers was so thick the boats had to feel their way with radar in zero/zero visibility.

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