The second night at Bungalo Bay, Racha Yai was not pleasant. The wind got up to 26 knotts but we went to sleep with the knowledge that the mooring ball had held fine the first night. At 4 in the morning we both heard a thud and thought something had bumped the boat. Rob went out and shouted to me 'were loose' The buoy had broken off at the base of the rope, 7m down. Rob disconnected the rope (thick good rope) and thew it overboard. It must have chaffed though. Sorry to the vessel that connects with that rope.
He started the motors and we found another mooring ball. Doing this in the dark it no fun. I needed three hands, one for the torch, one for the stick to pick up the rope attached to the mooring ball, and one hand to thread our ropes through the mooring ball ropes. So I sacrificed the torch and ended up with our rope twisted around one of the stanchions of the boat, these are not made to hold 19 Tons of boat! All the pressure was on this. Rob came down and pulled the boat forward while I undid the rope and corrected things. Robs fingers were numb for a while after that.
So by 4.30 am we were tied up again, but I did not trust the situation and stayed on watch till 7am when we left and headed back to Phuket.
We have a friend here who found his yacht on the rocks after a buoy broke. And another friend told us of his nightmare when a big live-aboard boat broke off its buoy and floated back bumping his boat as it went by. Luckily neither of these boats was badly damaged. The scary thought is that we were off our boat for 3 hours, if it had happened then........ our angels were looking after us!
We will now only use our anchor!
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