That was us. All the practice of safe anchoring techniques paid off for us yesterday and we are still alive.
Here’s what happened: Anchored about 400 yards east of Zero Rock. Drop the lines straight down. A bit lumpy but everything is a perfect scenario.
After about an hour we see a tug pulling two huge barges in tandem coming around from Victoria heading our general direction.
As he gets closer (1km) away we see that he is heading right for the zero rock light beacon. We look and can’t see anyone at the helm. We honk and try call on the radio with no response. He gets closer and closer and we all get a bad feeling. We thought maybe he was possibly going to pass on the other side of Zero Rock where there were no boats at all, hard for us to judge out in the lumps where he was going.
If we wanted to pull up our anchor we would have had to head straight at him for our retrieval to work and we didn’t want to do that as the tug appeared unmanned and he was heading straight for Zero Rock. We would have been in-between him and the rock.
Right before what appeared to be him crashing aground he turns last second straight at us. His bardge that he was pulling way behind him starts a fast drift in the wind right at us.
We fire the engine, pull the emergency release on our side line and off we go. 45 seconds later the barge runs over our scotchman. It happened very fast! We keep our distance and wait for our scotchman to reappear.... and it didn’t.
He barely clears Zero Rock.
After we collect ourselves and I change my underwear... we go back to our GPS mark to see if we can find our top floating line and mini float in case he broke our scotchman off but it is nowhere to be seen. He is dragging it! We would have been pulled under his barge.
We call the coast guard to let them know what happened and to let them know that there is a madman tug driver driving between Sydney Island and James Island dragging 500ft of rope with a Bruce anchor behind him through the infested commercial crab trap line.
They tracked him and his path and gave us his boat name and filed a report with transport Canada which we have to follow up on this Monday.
To top it off we finally get him on the radio after the coast guard contacts and he laughs at us!
We head home with no Hali’s, no anchor system. I get home and Hug my family.
I never thought it would ever have to emergency release as we fish slow currents and we leave ourselves lots of room.
It can happen to anyone I guess. It does not need to be said but.... be careful out there! Keep your knife close to your hand in case your release knot fails.
Nice meeting you Casper! Hopefully we see you again when we are having a better day.
