There’s a first time for everything.
We’ve sailed a fair distance now, and during that time we’ve probably anchored more than 1000 nights in countless bays, coves, inlets, caletas, and senos. Our approach for entering a new anchorage is always the same – we read any available background information if we have a cruising guidebook for the area, we slow down outside to assess the entrance and the conditions, and we proceed slowly into the anchorage before we loop in a circle to look for shallow spots, rocks, or any other hazards. At that point, we pick a spot and drop the anchor.
Puerto Sergio is located in Grupos Isla Smith near the western end of Canal Darwin. It’s described as a “veritable natural harbor”, and “one of the best anchorages” in the area, and there’s a mention of a rock in the far corner of the bay. It was conveniently located for a stop, so we decided to check it out.
We followed our normal procedure, slowing to a few knots of boat speed for the entrance. Once we were inside the bay, we started a slow turn to starboard to start to check out the edge of the anchorage.
CRUNCH!
The boat stopped in an instant with a huge bang, mast shuddering, rigging creaking, and crew thrown forward. The cruising guide book neglected to mention the rock lurking just beneath the surface nearly in the middle of the entrance channel, or perhaps not enough people have used this particular anchorage to find it.
Find it we did, and we found it with Madrone’s keel. Plenty shaken, we motored a safe distance away and dropped the anchor to regroup. Our trusty GoPro on a boathook showed a decent sized bite out of the bottom front corner of the keel, everything inside was thrown against the forward edge of its storage locker from the sudden deceleration, and the crew was definitely humbled.
It could have been quite bad – we are a long way from any kind of repair facilities for a boat like Madrone. But the boat is happily strongly built, there’s no water ingress into the boat, and it’s likely that the damage is just to the solid fiberglass hull and will be repairable.
We’re going to try to not make this a habit!
