Leaving the boat at anchor while you go ashore
A day ashore is half the point of cruising. How we decide whether the boat can be left, what we do before we go, and how we keep an eye on her from a café table.
In this piece
Leaving the boat at anchor while you go ashore is reasonable when the forecast is settled for the whole time you will be away and for the ride back, the anchor has been backed down on hard and has held through a gust, the bottom is good holding and there is clear water behind the boat. It is a poor idea when thunderstorms or a wind shift are forecast, when a lee shore is close astern, when the holding is weed or rock, or when the bay is crowded and still filling up.
Most days fall somewhere between those two lists. This is how we decide, and what we do before the dinghy leaves.
When leaving the boat unattended at anchor is reasonable
Start with the forecast for the hours you will be away, plus a margin. If you plan to be back by six, read the wind until nine. In the Aegean in summer the morning is usually the quietest part of the day, and the sea breeze or the meltemi builds through the afternoon. A bay that was glassy when you left at ten can have 20 knots blowing through it by four.
Then the anchor. We do not leave a boat on an anchor that has not been backed down on: engine astern, building slowly to something near cruising revs, held there for half a minute with a transit lined up. Better still, watch it hold through a real gust before you go. If you can swim, look at it. An anchor buried in sand up to its shank is one you can leave; one lying on its side, holding by the tip of a fluke, is not.
Then the room. A boat that drags slowly across open water toward the far side of a big bay gives you time to get back. One with rocks 40 m astern gives you none.
When to stay aboard
- Thunderstorms in the forecast, even “isolated” ones. A squall gives little warning and can come from any direction.
- A wind shift during the hours you will be away, above all one that turns the bay into a lee shore.
- Weed, rock or seagrass where you could not find sand, or an anchor that was slow to set.
- A tight bay still filling up, where the next arrival may drop across your chain or drag down on you.
- More wind forecast than you would happily re-anchor in, short-handed and in a hurry.
On days like that, go ashore in shifts. Whoever stays aboard does not need to be the skipper. They need to be able to start the engine, motor gently up toward the anchor to take the load off it, and call you.
The dinghy ride back
Think about the trip back before the trip in. A ride ashore in the morning calm can become a ride back into 20 knots and a short chop, wet and slow in an inflatable with a few horsepower. Choose a landing that keeps that ride short.
The opposite case has a trap in it. If the wind is blowing off the shore, the ride back to the boat is downwind and easy, and an outboard that stops on the way lets the wind carry you past her and out of the bay. Carry oars that fit the rowlocks, a handheld VHF or a phone in a waterproof pouch, and a torch if you might come back after dark, and wear the kill cord. Be honest about whether you could row that dinghy against the afternoon’s forecast wind. Most inflatables row badly into anything fresh.
Close up the boat
Shut every hatch and port before you go, even on a blue morning. An afternoon squall is a miserable thing to come back to through an open forehatch, and a boat swinging to a new wind can take spray over the bow. Turn the gas off at the bottle, and switch off whatever does not need to run while you are away.
Lock the companionway and the cockpit lockers. The bigger target is usually the dinghy: lock it to the dock or to something solid on the beach with a steel cable, and lock the outboard to the transom. A small, scruffy outboard locked on is a lot less tempting than the shiny one beside it. The Caribbean cruisers’ rule, “lift it, lock it or lose it”, is good advice anywhere, and the lifting part applies when you get back for the night.
Lights and the neighbours
If there is any chance you will be back after dark, switch the anchor light on before you leave. The rules want it shown at anchor from sunset whether anyone is aboard or not, and from a dinghy at night it is how you will find your own boat among twenty others. With an LED light, a few hours burning in daylight costs almost nothing.
Then tell a neighbour. A word to the boat next door, “we are ashore until five, here is our number”, costs nothing, and most crews will keep half an eye out and call you if your boat starts to move. Some would go further and let out chain or start your engine if they knew where the key was; that is a conversation to have face to face, never an assumption. For a longer trip inland, tell someone where you are going and when you will be back. It is a float plan, written for the land.
Anchor watch from shore
The simplest anchor watch from shore is a table with a view of the boat. Choose the taverna by where it sits as much as by its menu. If you can see her, you can see her swing, and you will notice when she starts moving differently from the boats around her. It works well until the food arrives.
For anything longer than lunch, or out of sight of the water, a second phone does the job: the one left aboard runs the anchor alarm, and the one in your pocket shows what it sees. Set the radius on the phone aboard as carefully as you would for a night (how to set an anchor alarm radius has the sum), because nobody aboard will be there to judge a false alarm.
In SafeBoat this is pairing, and it needs a free account. An 8 character code, valid for 12 hours, pairs the two phones, either way round. The phone aboard shares its anchor watch every 30 seconds to 10 minutes, one minute by default, and every 10 seconds once the boat is drifting. Your phone shows the zone, the boat, the distance, the track and whether the updates are arriving on time. It gets a push alert if the boat drifts, repeated until it is delivered, and another if the phone aboard loses its GPS or the fix gets too weak.
The phone aboard does all the work, so it needs two things. A data connection, because the alerts travel over it: check that the anchorage has mobile signal before you rely on it. And charge: a phone running GPS with the anchor alarm on all day uses a lot of battery, and the app has no battery alarm, so plug it into the boat’s USB and check that it is actually charging. A phone that has gone flat or lost its signal cannot tell you so. Glance at the update status now and then; a watch that stopped an hour ago shows up there.
If she drags while you are ashore
Get back quickly, but get back safely: a dinghy flipped in a hurry in 25 knots helps nobody. Call the neighbours on the way, by phone or on the VHF; a crew on the spot can often do more in two minutes than you can in ten. Once aboard it is the same drill as any other drag: engine on, a look for lines in the water, take the load off the anchor, then decide whether to let out more chain or start again. What to do when your anchor drags has the full order.
And when you come back on a good day, look at the track the phone drew while you were away. A tidy fan of arcs on one side of the anchor tells you the bay can be left in that wind, which is worth knowing the next time you are deciding over breakfast.