Anchors Away!

Guess what time we pulled up anchor?  Yep, 6:45 a.m. again.  It was a pretty uneventful travel day other than a few up bound tows to pass.  The excitement didn't start until we tried to anchor.  The winds had picked up out of the north, which gave us a nice push down the river, but when it came time to anchor we wanted to try to get as much protection from them as we could.  So we tried to anchor in the Tensas River which runs east to west, but has quite an incredible tidal current that rips through it.  Our first attempt east of Big Briar Creek, which runs north and is where we usually anchor, failed without the anchor holding.  Then we attempted west of Big Briar Creek, but were not having any better luck.  "The Bar-B" went even farther west ahead of us and tried their luck without success.  All of this took a while with talk of just anchoring up Big Briar Creek despite the north winds because we have been in there multiple times with good holding and once even in some strong north winds.  "The Bar-B" even went up there for a short time while we were trying to determine what to do.  Now when we went to pull up our anchor the windlass that was giving us trouble since last winter, died.  So Ray had to pull the all chain and 35 pound anchor up by hand.  With all of that going on "The Bar-B" offered to try to get anchored in Big Briar Creek and then we could raft to them so that we would not have to put our anchor back down.  Their first attempt was not successful so Ray decided to just go ahead and try our anchor, not thinking that there was not enough chain rode outside the windlass to hold us, but it did!  We were stuck!  I told him not to pull it up now.  Once he was assured we were stuck we pulled more chain out of the windlass with effort on both of our parts.  Well, we were anchored.  Getting it up in the morning might be another story.  Bob offered to come over and help if needed, but he had back surgery the summer before this so that didn't seem practical.
With all of this we ended up traveling 72 miles in ten hours, some from trying to find a spot to anchor.  Of course once we were anchored the winds died down.  We enjoyed the rest of the evening listening to the Georgia Bulldogs play the first half of the football game via Sirius radio.