breeze, and I got up and gave her more scope on her hawser. Inside
another hour there was no doubt that we were in for a southeaster.

It is not nice to leave a warm bed and get out of a bad anchorage in a
black blowy night, but we arose to the occasion, put in two reefs, and
started to heave up. The winch was old, and the strain of the jumping
head sea was too much for it. With the winch out of commission, it was
impossible to heave up by hand. We knew, because we tried it and
slaughtered our hands. Now a sailor hates to lose an anchor. It is a
matter of pride. Of course, we could have buoyed ours and slipped it.
Instead, however, I gave her still more hawser, veered her, and dropped
the second anchor.

There was little sleep after that, for first one and then the other of us
would be rolled out of our bunks. The increasing size of the seas told
us we were dragging, and when we struck the scoured channel we could tell
by the feel of it that our two anchors were fairly skating across. It
was a deep channel, the farther edge of it rising steeply like the wall
of a canyon, and when our anchors started up that wall they hit in and
held.

Yet, when we fetched up, through the darkness we could hear the seas
breaking on the solid shore astern, and so near was it that we shortened
the skiff's painter.

Daylight showed us that between the stern of the skiff and destruction
was no more than a score of feet. And how it did blow! There were
times, in the gusts, when the wind must have approached a velocity of
seventy or eighty miles an hour. But the anchors held, and so nobly that
our final anxiety was that the for'ard bitts would be jerked clean out of