Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Avonmouth ·
The Dredger's Lost Anchor
A retired dredger master finds his lost anchor back on deck, the chain coiled for sea and the shackle seized with fresh tarred twine, though he sold the boat twenty years ago and dropped the anchor himself in the channel.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: Rufus Halloway, retired dredger master
I dropped the best anchor I ever owned into the Avonmouth channel on the last day I took the dredger out, in the autumn of 2003. We were running a survey of the silt bars and the chain fouled on a wreck at the mouth. I put the engine astern, and the chain parted, and the anchor went down in twelve fathoms of brown water with forty fathoms of good chain attached to it. I wrote it in the log. I told the harbour master. He said the channel would take it and the tide would bury it, and that it was not worth the cost of a diver.
I sold the dredger the following spring to a firm from the coast. I retired to a cottage at the top of the town and I did not go down to the quay much after that.
Last month my neighbour, Dan Pryor, came round to ask whether I still wanted the old fish box in his shed. He said he had found something odd in it. When he showed me, I stood on his step and could not speak.
It was my anchor. The Admiralty pattern, with the bent shank I had straightened myself and the flukes worn bright from twenty years of biting mud. And the chain was coiled beside it in neat flat rings, the way I always coiled it, with the bitter end laid out to starboard, ready for the next run. The shackle at the anchor end had been seized with fresh tarred twine, a double seizing, tight and workmanlike, the sort of job a deckhand does when he expects the boat to be at sea before the week is out.
I know that twine. I used to buy it by the coil from the chandler on Harbour Street. The chandler has been dead for ten years, and the shop sells paint now.
Dan said he had found the box on the foreshore at low water, wedged against the stones at the foot of the old slipway. He had carried it up the steps on his back and set it in his shed without opening it, because it was heavy and he did not want to damage anything. He had only opened it that morning, when he saw the rust was not on the chain.
I did not take the anchor. I could not. I asked Dan to leave it where it was.
The harbour board has been out to look at it. They say the chain is the right size for the dredger's old mooring and that the seizing is consistent with work done in the last few months. They have no record of the anchor being recovered. The Admiralty pattern is not made any more. The man from the board wrote the details in his book, very carefully, and said he would be in touch.
I go down to the quay now most mornings, to look at the water. The dredger is gone. But I have noticed that the bollards on the north side are always wet in the mornings, as though something heavy had been warped round them in the night and taken off again before the light. And every so often I see a single new length of tarred twine, neatly tied to a cleat, waiting for somebody to come back and make fast.