We are tied on the inside of a little floating pontoon by the grace of the owners. It seemed safe enough when we arrived yesterday but it is completely open to any waves and swell coming from the north. It’s 0200ish now and for some of the last couple of hours we have been grey knuckled trying to save the boat from bashing herself to bits on the pontoon. Dangerous and unfunny. There has been a series of big waves coming across the channel and VG and the pontoon have been violently out of phase and our puny fenders have barely coped. By a bit of inspired luck, I brought a pair of heavy mooring line snubbers from Oz and we have them woven into our bow and stern lines and I think they saved the boat tonight. So far…They are rubber cylinders that absorb the impact load when the boat and the pontoon move in opposite directions. VG weighs about 2 tons and without the snubbers would for sure have broken free and ended up on the rocks a few metres away. The snubbers and our springs. But my knuckles are still grey and the night isnt over yet. Watch this space. And you might be wondering why we don’t just anchor when things get pearshaped. VG’s anchor rode is about 200 feet of chain and rope. That means we can safely anchor in about 50 ft of water if the current isn’t too fierce. In these channels, the sides are rocky, sometimes cliffs, and they plunge sometimes almost vertically to more that 300 ft in places. We have to find sheltered shallow water to anchor and that’s why we are being very careful about not getting caught by a reversal of a 5 knot current with nowhere to go. We can only heathfart at about 2 knots and only sustain that for a couple of hours. Is, could you please confirm that these silly ramblings are actually reaching the blog?