Anchors and Such Useful Devices : In which Kathryn and Heidi discover that if you laugh hard enough, you stay warm

When we go water sampling, we have a number of bottles to fill with water taken from different depths, at a specific location on the lake. This naturally involves the need for a good anchor. I believe past entries have alluded to our issues on this front.... well, the other day, we achieved new heights in our ongoing drama of anchors.

There is another fisheries crew here right now doing some baseline surveys for the EIA, and they're sampling some of the same lakes as us. Tim and Paul have been a fantastic help over the last weeks, catching fish, helping us process them, bringing us grapefruit out at our Doris Lake haven... Well a couple of days ago, they set up a Fyke net in one of our study lakes. The tarp and mallet were left neatly folded on shore. The rope was very efficiently, and unfortunately, rolled up and stored in the boat - their boat. So when we went to take down the net (in which we had caught about 8,000 ninespined stickleback; okay, so it was only 552 but Tim and I had to measure each little 2" one of them), well, no rope to bundle it back together with.

No worries, we would just poach some rope from our anchor line. Seemed like a great idea.

Until we got onto our next sample lake the next day and I realised we had forgotten to put extra sideline in the boat.

Let me digress for a moment, to explain the cantankerous nature of sideline. This is thin nylon cord used for most fisheries stuff. I've decided the critical non-tangling lenght for sideline is 2 inches. It sees itself and gets into knots. Tight knots. That you cannot undo with your bone-chilled fingers, in the rain, while trying to get your nets in and out. Oh yeah; sideline will also tangle around anythign and everything within a 10 m radius.

Anyway. So we are doing our usual cruising around in circles trying to find our waypoint (yes, I know there are about 1000 satellites up here; somehow, our GPS still never works properly).

"Heidi," quoth I, "how deep is this lake?"
"Oh, about 15 m."

Ah.

"Let's take stock. We have a 15 m deep lake. We currently have a 7 m anchor line. We have no spare rope. We cannot find our waypoint. In other news, our GPS batteries are dying."

What we did have, fortunately, was a secchi disk. This is a black-and-white disk used to measure visibility in the lakes.

Meanwhile, Heidi was excavating for the spare batteries in the bottom of her bag. She found 3 pairs of spare gloves, some scarves, spare pens, emergency Clif bar, trail mix from 2 months ago... and eventually, the batteries. Which prompted my next rant. Why is everything always on the bottom of a bag? Is there, in fact, no top to a bag? Do bags consist entirely of bottom???

"Heidi," I said, when we finally found our waypoint, as I prepared to toss overboard our anchore, tied to the secchi disk, whose rope was spliced to the anchor rope, "you realise that if this fails, we will lose our anchor, our secchi, and our position?"

Did I mention that it was blowing a gale out of the north and that all of the other crews had already been pulled and gone back to camp, because the "Irish mist" was so thick and low that the chopper pilots were worried they couldn't fly?

We found ourselves blowing clear across the lake and every now and then, I'd pull in the anchor, we'd fire up the motor and teh GPS, and try to find our waypoint again for long enough to take another water grab to fill a few bottles.

About the 4th or 5th time we were zooming back across teh lake, having blown 200m off our position in 10 minutes, I turned to Heidi.

"Heidi," I said. "I didn't pull the anchor in that time."

We looked behind us, to see our anchor - and secchi disk - surfing cheerfully along the surface behind us.