Anchored in the Navy Islands.

We dinghy boated, hiked, swam off the boat many times and baked bread! So far we anchored out a couple of nights in some beautiful bays in the Navy Islands. This was the first overnight anchorage for our friends, I showed them how to set their anchor alarms so they could have a good nights sleep without worrying about anything. There are a number of ways you can do this, using your depth alarm, GPS drift alarm or setting up a security perimeter with your radar. If land enters the security zone, it means your drifting into land, and an alarm will sound to wake you from your sleep. The most common one that people use is the GPS drift alarm or commonly called the anchor alarm. I set this to .05 of a nautical mile on the Raymarine chart plotter. This is about 350 feet. Sounds like a lot but not really. If you let out 150 feet of anchor rode, that would create a swing diameter of 300 feet. My friends decided to set theirs to .02, they rather be safe than sorry. In my opinion this will keep you up all night with false alarms and mad dashes to the cock pit to see whats going on. I have done that many a times, that is why I also installed a repeater of the chart plotter on the salon TV, with a remote keyboard, so I can also control the chart plotter from down here, without having to run to the cock-pit.

However, this was a very secure anchorage, no tides, currents, protected and with very good holding. I decided to turn off my chart plotter and save the electricity all together, and get some good sleep. This comes with lots of experience anchoring in Georgian Bay and the Bahamas. You would not believe some of the conditions we had to anchor in. Search Anchoring on our blog for additional stories.

Thomas and I enjoyed the hikes in the island provincial parks.