Stress in de air!

There is a strain of cruiser that seems to suffer from an onslaught of stress of mammoth proportions at the the sight of another boat in an anchorage. We witnessed this when an old British pilot cutter started checking out a bit of water in Prickly Bay. Frankly if you can sail an old gaff cutter with a monster 10m bowsprit around UK waters then you are going to know what you are doing. But we watched the owner of American yacht Mr Curly rush to the bows of his ship and start yelling at the skipper that he couldn’t anchor there. A fairly violent exchange of words followed as the gaff owner came back with ‘does it look like I’m anchoring’ in a variety of colourful ways.

Little did we know we would soon experience the same thing but in Bequia. Motoring around at about 2.5 knots just checking out the seabed and distances from A-B and looking at our options when suddenly up rushes a woman on the bows of Troubador (in the foreground) and starts gesticulating wildly that we can’t anchor there and must move on. We are all a bit puzzled by this as firstly we are all at the stern about 50ft from the anchor, secondly the anchor is very visibly lashed in place stuck fast in the bow roller, and thirdly we are moving too fast and not altering our speed. We had already selected an anchoring spot which gave us plenty of room for comfort but we wanted to have a scan round mainly to organise the cleaning of our tender should we be able to row it ashore. We just looked at her and shrugged our shoulders. Maybe our interpretation was wrong and she was inviting us over for a drink?