Aground at anchor in the Bahia de Navidad Lagoon - 2020

You can see the red - low tide spot on the Garmin GPSMAP 942 chart plotter. As soon as we turned on the instruments the low water alarm went off😜😁 We were healing a bit over when Debbie realized that Ok, yes, we were aground! It was a negative low tide and that's what got us. We had been anchored at that spot for a few days without a problem.

Anchored at N19 11.266  W104 40.420

December 2020 anchored in the Bahia de Navidad Lagoon

Our depth was reading 6.1 but we only have a 5.5 draft?

The tide had at least another hour to go out and we figured if we waited any longer, we might not get off to re-anchor for several hours till the tide came in enough for us to get free. The wind was picking up and it ended up blowing over 20 knots so it was a good thing we worked our way off.

Churned up a lot of mud getting free.

 Debbie was at the helm and I was at the bow trying to get the anchor free. The anchor was in shallower water! Debbie moved the boat forward along with sculling (moving the wheel (rudder) back and forth to move the boat) while I raised the anchor till we were able to break it free and drag it to the boat then up out of the water. I put a lot of strain on the Lewmar H3 Anchor Windlass pulling the boat and our anchor/chain to the boat to get the anchor out of the shallower water but the windless handled it.

Debbie had to gun it to get us free again and out into deeper water, about a whopping 8.5 feet where we anchored.

After we were off and re-anchored we realized our depth was off on the chart plotter.

We put a used zinc on a line and dropped it over the side and measured the depth. It was about 7.5 feet so we reset our offset in order to have a few extra inches after our 5.5 foot draft. (We later reset our low water alarm.)

 We take a waypoint when we anchor. We do it on the chart plotter and a newer Garmin GPS Etrex 10 handheld GPS. We recently purchased this one and gave our old one to some fishermen.  We also "set the anchor" on the Samsung Tablet in the app "Watchmate" which is a companion to the Vesper Marine AIS 8000. This give us our anchor alarm in case we drag.