Raising Anchor

Yesterday Jessee and I helped the waterfront staff in one of their tasks. They needed to move a large anchor that was abandoned on the seafloor over to our swimming area for use as a new mooring for our rescue boat. In its current position, when the tide is really low and the wind is blowing from the southwest, the boat gets dangerously close to the rocks. In all the right conditions (wrong conditions?) the boat could sustain damage.

Abandoned Anchors

The objective was to dive down and raise one of the abandoned anchors using air-filled "lift bags." None of us had seen these anchors before, but we had GPS coordinates of where we could find them in the bay. We went out there initially with 400lbs of lift capacity believing it would be plenty. As soon as I got in the water and snorkeled over them, however, I knew we'd need more. I guessed just one of them was going to weigh over 1000lbs!

Since we were out there and had already gone through the effort of throwing our anchor out, we went down and gave it everything we had anyway. With all 400lbs of lift attached, we could just barely muscle it around. We'd need twice that to float it high enough for it to be towed back to the Center. The problem was we didn't have enough equipment to do it properly. We went back to the shed and grabbed everything we had that would float.

400lbs of lift barely moved it.

We spent another half an hour on the bottom (it was only about 12 or 13 feet deep) jerry-rigging it. Eventually, though, we got it up there. We had buoys tied on in several places, leaky lift bags that needed periodic re-filling, and even a few life jackets holding the thing precariously below the surface. If anything gave, we'd better not be underneath!

Getting there - 700lbs of lift.

Two big buoys finally got it off the bottom.

Freediving with a life jacket was challenging to say the least.

To raise it the last few inches, I climbed on top of the buoys to sink them slightly as the others pulled in the slack on the ropes. It worked well for most of them, but one twisted to the side and the rope slide out. I rolled off into the water and buoy went sailing towards the horizon. We tried swimming after it, but there was no hope. After a few heated words amongst the group, we cut the anchor loose from the boat (leaving it to drift freely in the bay) and chased down our lost buoy.

Attempting to sink a buoy.

Once we got things under control we still had about a half mile of towing to do. Two of us stayed in the water to make sure it wasn't going to get hung up on anything. We held on to the whole thing and were dragged back with the anchor. It wasn't all that far to go, but without proper tow lines the boat couldn't really go in a straight line. It would only veer to the left or right (depending on the side to which it was attached). As a result, we had to make big circles all the way in. People on shore must have really been wondering what the heck we were up to.

Getting dragged behind the boat.

Finally, we got it into position, deflated the bags, removed our improvised floats, and sank it in its new home. We'll still need to attach some mooring lines before we can use it, but the hard part it behind us. I was a bit worn out from it in the end (it took about 5 hours to do the whole thing), but it was great fun wrestling with it and problem solving to get it moved.