(Originally published in 2012)
This post is aimed at those of you who are out there doing it. It’s a little technical (probably a little too dry for the landlubber…) for those of you who aren’t actually into the sailing or liveaboard life. If you aren’t a sailor, try some of my narrative posts. Those have something for everybody.
So where were we? That’s right. We were choosing an anchor. You can go with the old standbys, or you can go with one of the newer, more “scientific” fad anchors. It can be something of a crapshoot. I left you with some really sage advice about not choosing an anchor so that you can anchor where you shouldn’t be trying to anchor anyway, but making your choice based on the type of bottom you SHOULD be anchoring in. Anyway, that discussion is yesterday’s news.
Now let’s talk about other anchoring issues. Do you have a good, sturdy bow anchor roller? Our old CSY 37 had the sturdiest anchor roller I have ever seen. You could almost hang the boat up, suspended by the anchor roller alone. It was a double bow roller that held two anchors at the ready and was solid enough to resist the lateral impact of those sudden snaps of the anchor rode in a squall situation. I have seen flimsy bow rollers that have bent and twisted under the strain of sitting at anchor in choppy water for only a relatively brief period. Remember, your bow roller is a very intimate connection between you and your anchor, and the whole setup is only as strong as its weakest link.
How about your rode? Our bow roller was home to our two most often used anchors; one roller carried the Delta, which at first served as our primary anchor, but later was replaced in that role by our smaller Bruce; the other, which at first carried our Bruce, later held the Danforth type Fortress FX-37 after the Bruce was promoted to primary anchor. Got all that? The discussion here is about the rode. I felt we could have done a better job picking our anchor choices when we started out but, on the other hand I felt we did a great job of choosing our rodes. My desire was to anchor on all chain as much as possible. We both just liked the security of chain, the lack of concern about coral or rocks or an otherwise rough bottom chewing its way through the rode when we might least expect it. I don’t like surprises. Chain tends to eliminate that. My choice was to have one rode of all chain, 3/8-inch high test galvanized. That rode was 200 feet. It probably should have been longer if we were going off on a much longer cruise, but for the depths that we routinely anchored in and for those that we were occasionally forced to anchor in, that was more than an adequate length for us. Ninety percent of our anchoring was in depths of fifteen feet or less. With our bow roller five feet above the water surface, we could anchor in fifteen feet and still have a 10:1 scope, more than I ever elected to use even in quite severe conditions. Normal scope for us was 4 or 5:1, and in heavy trade conditions I might go 6 or 7:1. And we always used a snubber. I made my snubber from 5/8” three-strand nylon with a 3/8” stainless steel chain hook on the end. I would normally snub it off about seven or eight feet down on the chain from the bow roller and cleat the snubber off so that the hook was just at the surface of the water. This gave us a nice quiet ride at anchor, no snap, no clunk of chain on windlass or deck.
You might inquire why I chose high-test chain and not the more economical BBB; and why did I choose galvanized over stainless, and why 3/8”. My evaluation of the charts for matching chain size to boat size indicated that 5/16” BBB was the appropriate size for a heavy boat in the size and weight range of our 37 foot CSY, but 3/8” was appropriate for the next category up. At the time, viewing our boat as our home and exercising my bigger is better philosophy, which I instinctively had adopted at that time, I felt that one size higher would give me the extra margin of safety that I sought. In addition, by choosing high-test I got an even greater margin of safety. Supposedly BBB chain will stretch and deform somewhat over time or under extreme stress, which serves as a little bit of safety margin before it breaks. High test, on the other hand, has about a 30% greater breaking strength, but it lacks that capacity to stretch and deform; instead it just suddenly breaks. However, the tradeoff in additional breaking strength is significant, beyond the stretching quality of the BBB and, in my opinion, was worth the extra expense. Since I had a large, heavy, very seaworthy old boat whose motion and handling would not be adversely affected by an extra few hundred pounds riding in the bow, and since our ground tackle was to be our only insurance plan, I opted for the extra protection of 3/8” high test.
What about stainless steel? It looks so cool! Stainless chain looks pretty, does not readily rust, and is fairly low maintenance. It doesn’t leave that puddle of rust stain on your deck or in your chain locker. But it sacrifices considerably in the breaking strength department relative to galvanized. Similar to high test, it has a very limited ability to stretch and/or deform and instead tends to break when it is stressed to its limits. Not only that, but stainless steel when it is placed in an environment where it has limited exposure to the air has a greater tendency to corrode, and the corrosion tends to weaken it further, not an unlikely scenario when it’s stacked in a castle down in the salty environment of the anchor locker. Thus, from a practical standpoint, you pay a premium price for substandard performance. In other words, extra moolah for what amounts to little more than eye candy.
For our second anchor we had a rope and chain combination rode – 250 feet of ¾” 3-strand nylon rope with 100 feet of the same 3/8” high-test chain as a leader. This allowed us to anchor on a 5 to 1 scope in 15 feet of water and still be sitting on all chain, which, as mentioned above, was our usual procedure. So generally this allowed us to anchor with either of our anchors under most circumstances and still sit comfortably on all chain. In those few situations where we needed to anchor on a really long scope, we could still do it and have mostly chain rather than rope in contact with the bottom, thus significantly reducing any likelihood of chafing on any rocks, coral, or other hard bottom substrate.
We also carried a fairly modest sized (read small) Danforth anchor mounted on the stern rail for those rare instances when we needed to limit our swing. For the rode on this we carried a 300 foot flat Ankarolina® strap type rode (a proprietary product made in Scandinavia) on a reel stored inside a cockpit locker. I’d love to say wonderful things about this slick-looking, very Scandinavianesque device but we almost never used our stern anchor. I can think of a couple of incidents where we used it to counter a wind versus current situation, and to keep our bow into the chop to reduce our roll, but that’s about it — hardly an experience worthy of great praise, but no complaints either. I just never really tested it.
For shackles and swivels we used standard galvanized hardware. We had been forewarned about the bullet-shaped stainless steel anchor swivels. They look sleek and attractive and roll through an anchor roller with little resistance. However they have a tendency to corrode in the cracks and crevices and break under strain. Just such an incident happened to some friends of ours down in the Dominican Republic and their boat ended up on the rocks as a result. Remember my reference to the weakest link. Your shackles and swivels may be small but they are just as important as the anchor and the chain and all of the other pieces of the puzzle. Use good galvanized shackles and as few swivels as you absolutely need. And mouse those threaded and opening parts with some good quality corrosion-resistant wire so that they don’t open inadvertently at one of those inopportune moments. Our one concession to the neatness and cleanliness of stainless was the stainless chain hook we used on our snubber, which kept the cockpit locker (and our deck) just a little cleaner and free from rust debris.
Read as much as you can on anchoring equipment, methods, and techniques, and get out there and practice, practice, practice until you have reinvented the whole concept. Dive your anchor whenever you can – that’s imperative. Get a hand-bearing compass and learn to take anchor bearings. Use your GPS anchor alarm. Like your aids-to-navigation, the more methods you use, the more confident you’ll be at what you’re doing. The more you practice, the more insight you’ll gain into what works for you (and what doesn’t). It’s your boat and, when you’re out there cruising it’s your home.
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