REMINISCENSES | Anchoring in hope

I was reading about that poor shipmaster dragged ashore in Australia to face criminal charges after his containership allegedly fouled the West Australia-Singapore undersea communications cable when his ship dragged in high winds off Perth. I sometimes wonder how you convey to a policeman the message that ships don’t stop, start, and steer like cars and that the average container vessel, when not under way, can’t hover in the sea like a DP drillship. Maybe the cablers ought to be digging deeper trenches for their undersea connections, although it is obviously easier and infinitely cheaper to fence off the sea and prosecute hapless mariners.

It’s also worth pointing out that the places where ships can anchor safely seem to get fewer and smaller as new custodians of the seabed claim their rights to criss-cross the bottom with cables and pipelines, supplemented by a cat’s cradle of electricity power lines joining up all the wind turbines sprouting like weeds after the spring rain. And if that wasn’t a hazard for the ship seeking some decent holding ground, the enthusiasm of the environmental movement may well have convinced the littoral state to declare huge areas of shallower water as a “nature reserve”, with fishing, dredging or even dropping a hook on the bottom, all deemed to be prohibited activities against fierce penalties.

Let’s face it; anchoring at the best of times can be a problematic business and one hedged around with hazards, as any perusal of the casualty records will tell you. Old hymns about anchoring “in hope” and whether your anchor “will hold in the storms of life” were not exaggerations and one suspects that many a mariner’s prayer has been for the anchor to “hold fast” in unpredictable winds, currents, and tides. Dragging an anchor, and the panic of getting safely under way, is no isolated incident and is always nasty in either a crowded anchorage or one where the “quality of the bottom” is suspect and a lee shore too close.

“Anchors for ordinary merchant ships haven’t really changed that much over the years, despite the explosion in ship sizes.”

I can still remember, as a very green junior third officer, keeping my first anchor watch as an OOW on a filthy night off the English coast. The master, who had anchored the ship in the early evening, gave me a clear brief about the tide, which was expected to turn about two hours into my watch, while drawing my attention to the freshening breeze. “Call me if you are in any doubt!” were his cheery parting words.

It was the turn of the tide that started to put doubts in my mind, despite my diligent cross bearings and a radar giving a rather dodgy echo off a low coastline. The wind clearly delayed the effect of the tide on the ship and convinced me that she was dragging as my circle of swing (It was some sixty years ago.) appeared to be becoming menacingly oval in shape. I had been confused by the yawing, so the master reassured me, but I still remember the doubts in my mind that night when I read about some poor ship that has come to grief in an anchorage.

Anchors for ordinary merchant ships haven’t really changed that much over the years, despite the explosion in ship sizes, and I would venture to suggest that the risk of things going badly wrong in an anchorage have not markedly reduced. I was reading in my Danton’s Seamanship manual that the holding power of patent stockless anchors – he suggests roughly three to four times the anchor’s weight – was not hugely increased since the Napoleonic wars. HMS Victory’s main anchor, with its buoyant oak stock, had a holding power of two to eight times its weight, so you might suggest that progress has been somewhat limited.

“Spending several days – even weeks – swinging around the hook in a crowded anchorage must be really quite alien.”

The change from the traditional stockless anchor to the Admiralty Cast Anchor took a long time, while clever anchors developed for the offshore industry failed to impress those operating conventional merchant ships. Ours tends to be a conservative industry.

Anchors are getting rather more use in these confusing days, with the pandemic (or shortage of lorry drivers – take your pick) slowing down port operations all around the world. If you are a containership driver, used to smoothly driving the ship alongside the instant you arrive, spending several days – even weeks – swinging around the hook in a crowded anchorage must be really quite alien. There is certainly no reason to relax, with the colossal windage of a nine-high stack of boxes on deck.

And there were even warnings for cruise ship captains which pointed out that their anchors were really not designed for several weeks of hard usage, as they lurked off coasts with no customers aboard. Several such ships lost anchors and cables in these unusual circumstances. That’s why hope is such a well-used sentiment when anchoring is concerned.

Submissions wanted! Do you have an exciting, amusing, or downright dangerous anecdote from your time in the maritime world? Send your submissions to: [email protected].