After we had managed to assemble all the parts, we sailed through the Grevelingen Sea to test everything. We wanted to observe our power consumption and see how the anchor behaves, whether it digs in well and whether the chain is long enough. We want to anchor often in bays in the future, so it has to be reliable. We dropped the anchor at our favourite spot right on the Brouwersdam at 8m depth and gave it extra chain. It is simply wonderful, especially in summer, hardly any tourists, no other sailors, you have the anchorage mostly to yourself and can watch the seals that sometimes come to the surface to sunbathe.
We looked at a weather app in the evening. There were more than 2-3 Beaufort winds during the day and according to the app the wind should only shift slightly to southwest (SW) 3 Bft, so a calm night.
Well, at least we found out that we can't rely on this weather app, because at 1 o'clock in the morning I was standing upright in bed, a loud creaking noise woke me up, the anchor chain was moving enormously over the seabed. I looked around to see if Hendrik had noticed. Then suddenly we were in the middle of a thunderstorm and strong gusts of wind. There were continuous flashes of lightning in the sky and our boat was spinning like a merry-go-round. Our flag was standing straight in the wind and fluttering. Will the flag still be there tomorrow? I had a few questions running through my head, will the anchor hold? Are we drifting? Were we alone here at the anchorage because the others knew about the storm?
Hendrik, of course, has an app for everything and checked on the right, the anchor was holding, we just turned 180° through the wind and the long chain on the bottom was making noises. So no panic on the Sans Souci. Hendrik still had to go out once to tie up the tiller, which was moving back and forth due to the strong wind.
We fooled around a bit more and after an hour, when the weather calmed down, we went to bed dead.
In the end, it was the best weather to test the anchor gear.
