Day 12 on the river, part 1

The day started at about 4:30 a.m., when I heard a gust of wind and a bang, and then the boat jumped. I jumped up and ran top side to see what was going on. We were very close to the boat that started running with us yesterday--we have been seeing him off and on for about a week. I thought at first the wind had swung us into each other, so I hollard at Dave that we had hit the other boat. I thought he was moving on the river. We could not see either shore in the dark, so it was hard to tell what was going on. I tried him on the radio with no luck. As Dave went to start the motor I ran up to pull anchor. The anchor at the front of the boat, chain, and 25' of rode was missing. Now we were heading for shore. About the time Dave got the motor going, the depth alarm went off, and indicated that we only had a couple of feet in depth before we would run aground. Dave had just gotten the boat to the main channel while I started to re-rig the new anchor rode and anchor. Then the motor stopped. It had gotten some air from changing the filter last night. (We did run it after changing the filter, but it must have had air trapped some where.) He was then able to get the outboard going. 

The hardware to hook the anchor to the chain did not fit.  Dave kept the boat in the channel using the GPS as we still could not see the shores. I did not find anything to hook up the new anchor. So I put 2 knots in the chain and a small clevis fasener to keep everything together. When dropping the anchor I could not tell if it had caught on the bottom or not, but after some checking we figured out that it had hooked and was holding. We watched everything for bit, then worked to get the main motor bled and running. We started the generator to recharge the batteries. Finally could get some coffee. It was still pitch black outside. At about 6:30 a.m. we pulled anchor and headed down river for the day. Right now its is about 10:00 am and feels like it has been a full day already.