8/10 St Ignace to St Ignace

8/10 St. Ignace to St. Ignace

OK, next attempt to make the straits. The wind was stronger than yesterday, and the waves bigger, and no other boats in sight anywhere. This should have been a hint for me, but I was blind to such omens. I cranked the engine to full power and headed under the bridge I by now knew so well. It was tough going, even with full power the boat was going very slowly and would occasionally even stop completely when it crashed into a wave. The waves were not just high (8 feet), but very steep and fast. I started taking water in through the companionway hatch and decided to call it quits after 4 hours in which I barely covered 10 miles. The return to St Ignace took just 1.5 hours! I anchored where I came from and had some lunch and was ready to take a little siesta when I noticed the landscape had changed. Incredulous, as I had set the anchor alarm which didn’t alert me, I checked the GPS and found that I was dragging anchor. It was blowing intensely, and after raising the anchor I found it fouled with seaweed. I decided to head for a different anchoring spot as my Danforth anchors don’t work well with weed. The new place inside the ferry harbor basin looked promising, but I failed again and again to make the anchor stick. Weed everywhere! Frustrated I gave up after an hour of failures and headed further north to a bay that seemed shallow and protected from the winds. Upon arrival I found that winds were still very strong and the seabed full of weed. Again, I tried anchoring multiple times, and eventually even used the stern anchor to stop Caprice from swinging. Maybe that did it, maybe the fact that the wind finally abated...