One more. A group of 4 guys on a 50' Moorings sloop for one of the guy's 40th birthday. The birthday boy and skipper was given the week long charter by his wife - sweet! The plan was to do a one-way from St. Vincent to Grenada. Everything was cool until one night near the end of the voyage when we moored at Union Island. The mooring buoys were all taken a much as we could see, then a boat-boy shows up and fishes a mooring pennant from below the water line. The pennant had an eye at the end through which we ran a 3/4" braded nylon dock line. The line was secured to the port and starboard bow cleats. That evening the trades were particularly stiff. We went to dinner ashore and can back to the boat relatively early to hit the sack. We had the bright idea of slipping our mooring line a few feet in case there was chaffing going on. Well, the wind was strong enough to push the boat against the mooring line hard enough so the line could not be slipped. Oh well, it will be OK. In the meantime the skipper had us prepare an anchor on deck in case we needed to deploy it rapidly. All is well and off to bed for everyone. For some reason we left the VHF on in the main cabin, which likely saved us. About 02:00 we hear the VHF light up with our boat name called out saying we were off our mooring. So now we had four grown men running around the deck in our underwear trying to get control of the boat. From the time we heard the radio transmission to the time we got the engine started we had blown through the mooring field missing five other yachts and out the entrance of the harbor missing the jetty. Were got back into the harbor and anchored in front of a working freighter, figuring we would move when there was some light. We now instituted anchor watches for the rest of the dark hours.

Post mortem is the 3/4" line had chaffed all the way through. We all kind of had the feeling that our mooring situation wasn't particularly satisfactory as evidenced by attempting to check for chaff and preparing the anchor. We could have easily checked the mooring line for chaff had we thought of turning on the motor and motoring up to the pennant to take the strain off. The boat that called us off the mooring was up wind of us and we later learned they were a couple doing a world cruise and they ALWAYS have an anchor watch. Had they not awaken us, we would have found ourselves on the rocks or on our way to South America. We decided to abandon the rest of the voyage since we were all very tired and really not well provisioned at this point. We turned the boat over to a Moorings skipper and flew to Grenada to rest on the beach.