The importance of good anchoring skills

From Pasman island we proceeded towards south and in the evening we anchored in the bay of city of Primosten. Bora (local SE wind, always blows from land to the sea) was blowing pretty heavy whole day (which made Tomaz happy) and the forecast was that wind will blow even harder in the night. We have plenty of trust in out big new anchor (33kg Rocna), nevertheless when we set it we always reverse the boat quite strongly to test the holding.

We were having a quiet evening after the dinner, Tomaz fiddling about the boat and myself battling with mobile internet to finish some mails. It was at about 10 in the evening as Tomaz shouted: "Watch this!" I looked into the darkness and saw a boat, almost as big as ours, drifting with the wind, obviously without the crew and without any lights. It missed our boat by 2 boat lengths and took direction towards the boat anchored next to us. I started shouting to alert the people on that boat and Tomaz brought our big lamp to light the drifting boat. The people from neighboring boat came out, only to see, how the drifting boat missed their boat by inches. The drifting boat then managed to miss two other boats and drifted towards open sea. We were all very happy nothing happened to our boats, especially our neighbors since they didn't even had the time to get the fenders. And after few minutes we saw a dinghy with couple of men paddling fast towards the run away boat. They were twice lucky - they saw what was happening pretty fast and they were able to catch the boat before it sailed all the way to Italy!

Then they motored the boat back into the bay, without any lights, of corse, and after several attempts they were happy with how they anchored the boat. And i was happy they didn't anchor in front of us (in the wind), but several boat lengths to the side. So if it was to happen again, they would surely miss us ....

And the next morning Primosten looked calm and peaceful like nothing ever happened .....