It may be unsurprising, but installing our new anchor chain wasn’t a slice of cake. It was …the whole cake. I’m going to walk through our day of bringing the anchor chain to the boat, and then the day of how we rid ourselves of the old rusty chain and put the new anchor chain in place.
We started by arriving bright and early at Budget Marine to buy our new chain. We knew that we wanted 50 meters of chain for our primary anchor, plus an additional 3 meters for our secondary emergency anchor. We helped by sizing out the chain on the ground- and then using giant shears to cut the links. (Please note, at every single step of this journey we have forgotten to wear appropriate footwear, but I honestly would suggest wearing real shoes when doing this kind of thing. It’s just…duh).
Once cut- we borrowed (read, liberated) a wheelbarrow from the nearby boatyard, and carted the chain to our dinghy. Paul sat in the dinghy while I slowly fed the chain out to him from the wheelbarrow, and then crossed our fingers it wouldn’t sink (it didn’t). I returned the wheelbarrow to her original home- and off we went.
A dinghy with two grownups and 60 meters of anchor chain is a bit heavy- so we weren’t able to plane. But luckily the swell and the wind were down that day, so we moved slowly through the waves toward the Tintas- about 1 NM away.
This time, I sat in the dinghy while Paul stood on the deck and I fed the chain out to him, and into a temporary storage box that lived on our deck for awhile. After transferring the chain to so many different vessels, our biceps were sore- but the real work was still to come.
A few days later, we had a sail plan to leave St Thomas and head to St Croix- in anticipation of having a better point of sail toward our upcoming destination of St Martin. We left bright and early- and after crossing the Puerto Rico trench, which marks the boundary between the Caribbean sea and the Atlantic ocean, as well as the deepest point of the Atlantic- we disconnected our anchor, and let our rusty anchor chain out to the great depths, along with a secret message to the god of the sea.
So, down one anchor chain, but still with rust stains from hell, I set to work on a scrub job to meet all scrub jobs. Paul hove-to so we could both focus on cleaning and not sailing, and we spent the next 1.5 hours scrubbing everywhere the old rust would touch the new chain. It was surprising the difference that the cleaning job made, but I knew that this was just the first round of cleaning.
Once I’d decided round one was over, we set sail for St Croix, and got into Christiansted after night fall. We were both very tired- and the entrance to Long Reef is a tricky harbor to navigate, shallow and reefy as the name might suggest.
Paul set our secondary anchor with short chain, and a line tied to our cleat so we could anchor overnight (it only took two tries to set, with Paul manually hauling the chain up when we slid). We set the Anchor Watch app to see if we’d drift, scarfed down a box of Mac N Cheese, and caught some much needed zzz’s. Both of us were a bit sunburned and physically taxed.
The next morning, I got to work on cleaning round 2. Paul did round 3. And after my touch up round 4, we deemed the anchor chain locker improved enough to put the chain in. So— this time, Paul stood on the deck and I stood in the locker as we lowered our gorgeous new chain in- fed it through the windlass, and reattached our anchor. Our beautiful new chain was in place- and our boat looked like a new girl.
We hauled up the secondary anchor- and set on our 27 hour sail to St Martin, where we dropped anchor in beautiful Marigot, watching our chain literally shining through the clear water. Success.
So that is the story of the new chain, but I must say that Paul and I have had a list of things to do since we moved aboard, and we are miraculously getting close to the end of it (with new additions along the way). Next week- we’ll announce some pretty big news—and (spoiler) it’s not the new air conditioner we got two days ago.
With love
Paul and Lindsay
TIBURON MARINO 