Dragging Anchor in a Squall

The wind shrieking through the rigging jolted me awake in the middle of the night. It sounded like the bimini was being ripped to shreds. I grabbed my iPad to check our position on the way to the cockpit and did a double take: we were 25 yards from where we had dropped the hook a few hours earlier.

It had been the last day of a 10-day, late-July Chesapeake Bay cruise with my two longtime sailing friends, John and Barbara, on my Catalina 320. We had planned to celebrate our last night with a final anchor out, but first had to spend the afternoon avoiding squalls. A nasty one threatened as we motored south under the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. We began