On Christmas Eve 1991, I took myself for a solo scuba dive at Semaphore jetty. My dive log book reports that I found an old anchor during my dive. I believe that I came across the same anchor in January 1994. I must’ve decided that I wanted to retrieve the anchor because I returned to look for it again the following month.
(Taken from the background of a photo)
I searched for the anchor at low tide. When I found it again, I marked it with a buoy and returned to my Zodiac inflatable dinghy and moved the dinghy alongside the anchor. I then simply hoisted the good-sized anchor with chain attached up on to the bow.
After a snorkel, I motored back to the boat ramp by Fort Glanville. That is when I thought that my efforts to keep the anchor became undone. My buddy’s car sank on the beach during our boat retrieval. We had to abandon her car and rely on my wife to bring my car down to tow my boat away.
We left the anchor with the now-abandoned car. Nobody was more surprised than me when my buddy turned up at my front door with the anchor during the night.
I later removed the marine growth from the anchor and chain. I would’ve liked to have treated the anchor in some way to preserve it, but that all seemed too difficult for me.
Here is a photo of the anchor on display in my garden: -
The anchor made a good garden display for a few years, but it was starting to crumble a bit. The other problem that I had was that I was consistently moving house and having to take the anchor with me. With yet another move approaching, I decided to let the anchor go, as it were. I left the anchor on the footpath out in the street, and it was soon taken by a passerby.
I have been without a large anchor since that day. I did, however, find another large (mooring?) anchor at Semaphore jetty. I was driving home along the Esplanade in March 2012 when I saw just how perfect the sea conditions were for a snorkel. I quickly went back home to grab my snorkel gear and returned to the jetty.
Whilst snorkelling in clear water, I came across this large anchor: -
I took a couple of photos of the anchor from the surface at the time. My plan was to return to the spot with scuba gear on another day and take a closer look at the anchor. I did that almost two months later.
Although it was sunny and the sea was flat calm that day, visibility was poor. Even though I spent some 80 minutes in the water, I did not find any trace of the anchor at all.
The viz was so bad that I told myself that I could’ve swam straight past the anchor and not seen it. Whilst I was in the midst of rating this dive as the worst dive in my life, I pulled an old ‘marble’ bottle out of the sand. “Not so bad after all,” I said to myself before returning to shore with the bottle in my catchbag.
I did try to find the anchor again on a few occasions, including as late as 2020, but without any success at all.
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