Anchor rode question.....again

I plan on purchasing 150 to 200' of 5/16" HT chain this weekend for my 32' Nordic Tug.
I currently have 50' of 5/16" HT spliced to 200' of what appears to be 5/8" 3 strand. Frankly, I'd be ok just keeping what I have except with my Lofrans windlass, the gypsy doesn't accept rope. So I have to stuff the 3 strand bit by bit into the hawse pipe every time I let out more than the 50' of chain.
I can't imagine having to do this every time I anchor or in foul weather.
Am I missing something here?
So I figured I'd just increase the length of chain to avoid that.
My question:
I noticed the load limit of the 5/16 HT chain is 3900 pounds.
For 5/8 3 strand the braking strength is 12,200 pounds.
That's a big difference in breaking strength.
What is the appropriate size 3strand for my boat of approx. 16,500 displacement and 5/16 HT chain?
Should I drop down to 1/2" 3 strand which breaks at 7500 pounds?

5/8 nylon is really heavy for o Nite in your sized boat.

usually it will have no stretch at all as the loading is too low.

It would make a better storm rode.

More light chain would be self storing , but would easily go taught , so snubbers etc is required .

Simplest is more chain and a quick snubber setup.

A smaller anchor line and a bigger hole to feed it into might work.

Working load limit for chain is not the same as breaking strength for nylon. Chain has at least a 2:1 safety factor before it starts to deform and then it takes even more load for it to break.

Nylon will stretch at least 25% before it breaks, so its equivalent working load limit is much lower than breaking strength.

5/16" HT chain has about the same real world strength as 9/16" nylon. Your 5/8" rode is even higher. So don' t worry. Stick with what you got.

David

I have 5/8" nylon Brait and love the way it stacks and piles. Always comes up or out w/o any trouble. The Brait may go back and forth through your deck hole or from your anchor locker as well. I store my rode w 15' of chain (except the anchor(s)) in a box on deck just in front of the forecabin. Three strand would not fit in the box and if it did I'd have to do a lot of cussing to get it out. No problem w the Brait.
Chain is so heavy one needs or possibly should size it on the light side. A boat heavy in the bow handles poorly and can even be unnecessarily wet. My boat is the same weight as yours and I may use more chain in the future but not 5/16". I'd choose 1/4" HT but not w the confidence I have in my 5/8" nylon.
As to the "5/8ths" size nylon I choose it for our Alaskan venture. Probably don't need it down here in Washington state. But I have it.

Don't forget that wet nylon weighs a lot too....and doesn't dry fast in a locker.

Compare the difference between a wet nylon rode and chain ...not just consider the weight of chain up forward.

Always better to hear all sides and think through what you are about to do than just get reactionary over some claims.....

If your bow can take the weight, and on a 32 NT, I'm confident it can, I'd go all chain, too. I have 5/16 HT chain (120') and 5/8 8-ply Brait (240 ') on my near-20,000 34 LRC. It's well sized for my boat and works like a charm. I love the combo rode, but have a gypsy which handles both with ease.

I used to have a power winch on the bow which required me to keep tension on a line wrapped a couple of times around the winch capstan to pull in the line. When I got to the chain, I'd have to hand-haul that. The whole mess would pile on my foredeck and then I'd have to hand feed it into the deck channel. It was messy and a real PITA.

Have you considered changing your gypsy to allow it to handle both chain and line? Then it could feed both into your anchor locker.

EDIT: I looked it up and confirmed the 5/8 8-ply Brait. I had ordered the 9/16 but Defender recommended the upsize to 5/8 to eliminate slip in the gypsy. http://www.defender.com/product3.jsp?path=-1|2078767|2226887|2226892&id=1018575

I am in NW and use 140 ft of 5/8 C then 5/8 Brait boat at 34,000 lb. works very well for 2 years now on present boat and 5 years on previous.. The only issue I have is the chain rope splice which needs monitoring and some help at times getting through the locker aperture. In shallow water the rope does not get deployed and in most protected anchorages I only need a rope snubber to quiet the chain noise on the bow roller.

I have been facing your same dilemma and am just now this week ordering a new Lofrans Tigress windlass and 550' (a full barrel) of 5/16 HT chain.

I think that 5/16 HT is just fine for your boat, and it is just fine for my boat, with its significantly higher windage. We need to remember that the old "standard" was 3/8 BBB which has a lower working load limit than 5/16 HT chain.

As far as rode size, if you continue with some rode in a combo situation, I think 5/8 is just fine and not overkill.

Tunajoe.

I also have a 32' boat. Mine weighs in the slings about 22-23,000# loaded.

Last year I installed a Lofrans Tigres windlass on my boat. I have detailed this before but will repeat a short version which MAY add to your info a bit.

I went with 275' of 1/4 G40HT chain plus 150' of 1/2 nylon line. I really do not expect to need to use the nylon except once in a long, long time.

I may knock 25 or 50 ft off this year as it has made a difference in handling in choppy water. The bow is a bit down from previously. A large chunk of that is from the added weight of the new windlass, now 53# from about 25 or 30#.

My old setup was 100' 3/8BBB chain with 250' 1/2 nylon. It worked well except for back trouble.

Your boat is fuller bowed than mine so should handle some extra weight better.
I went down in chain size to go up in length and control weight even though the total package I have added about 100#. The chain working strength is still enough for my boat and was the same as the old BBB 3/8 although the testing procedure was less stringent. Dbjangi made me aware of that little oddity as I missed it.

I also made up a snubber line of ~35' with 1/2 triple lay line that has one of the rubber snubbers installed in it. I have watched it work in windy conditions and the rubber stretches first to take out some of the initial shock and then the nylon stretches. I figure this year I will add a second rubber to add to the stretch.
I know this may raise some eyebrows but it does appear to help. If not, then I will remove the second.

If money isn't too big an obstacle I would go for the 200' initially. If you think it adds to much weight then you can always remove some. Of do like I did and go with the 1/4" HT but much longer with a smaller rope length. That should be strong enough/

Take a bit of time to consider the options and look up some of those older threads. There is alot of arguement but also some good info in there.

Just realized on my post #7 chain size is wrong should read 3/8 road is 5/8

eyschulman said:

I am in NW and use 140 ft of 5/8 C then 5/8 brait... The only issue I have is the chain rope splice which needs monitoring and some help at times getting through the locker aperture...

Click to expand...

Surely some inventor can design a rope/chain connector system other than a splice, which will run through both gypsy and hawse pipe.
Art?
Eric?

Thanks for the confidence Bruce and I may do that some day. But for now w my setup I don't need a splice. I use shackles and thimbles. My 15' of chain is 12' of 5/16" and 3' of 3/8ths next to the anchor shank. So I have 3 shackles in my rode. I think the chain weight is mostly useful for coaxing the anchor to set. In a big blow one runs out of catenary anyway so why be concerned about it at all seems a good question to me. Has anybody had any experience w using no chain at all? I haven't tried that.

psneeld said:

Don't forget that wet nylon weighs a lot too....and doesn't dry fast in a locker.

Compare the difference between a wet nylon rode and chain ...not just consider the weight of chain up forward.

Always better to hear all sides and think through what you are about to do than just get reactionary over some claims.....

Click to expand...

Scott that's a very good point. I'm always amazed how much it weighs when I pick up my rode box .. even dry. So you can't write off the weight of nylon line as amounting to next to nothing. And of course wet it would be much more. Reminds me of a TV program "All Things Considered". Another thing is that both chain and line get lighter in the water. Neither float of course but I'm sure they get a bit lighter.

Actually I've been waiting years for someone to mention the weight of line.

I'd love to go all chain.
But I'm concerned about all the weight up front.
There is a Nordic Tug users group (Sentoa.org) and I spent a couple of weeks going thru all the archived posts and one that stuck out was Jim Cress, the CEO and president of NT saying the 32 wasn't designed for all the weight of an all chain rode. He felt 200' of chain was too much.
Yet several owners chimed in that they noticed no performance issues/ride issues with 200' of chain.

I'm thinking I'll buy 200' of chain and see how the boat rides and if I need to, I can always shorten it. The only hassle is the splice of the rope to chain.
I've watched several videos on it, but I'm not sure I'd trust my splice.

Greetings,
Mr. Tuna. Rather than buying 200' of chain, how about a barrel filled with water to the weight of the chain and put it in the foredeck to see how it might effect performance?

Good advice. You know the weight of the chain. Subtract the current rode weight and place that weight, securely, on your bow.

With my 120 ft of chain, I often anchor in the Bay/Delta in 30 or so ft of water on all chain. If I use line, it's usually not more than another 30-60 ft. Depending on your normal anchoring depths and wind/current combos, you might get along just fine with another 100 or so ft of chain. But I'd put on all I could afford in weight or $$, whichever comes first.

Tunajoe said:

I'd love to go all chain.
But I'm concerned about all the weight up front.
There is a Nordic Tug users group (Sentoa.org) and I spent a couple of weeks going thru all the archived posts and one that stuck out was Jim Cress, the CEO and president of NT saying the 32 wasn't designed for all the weight of an all chain rode. He felt 200' of chain was too much.
Yet several owners chimed in that they noticed no performance issues/ride issues with 200' of chain.

I'm thinking I'll buy 200' of chain and see how the boat rides and if I need to, I can always shorten it. The only hassle is the splice of the rope to chain.
I've watched several videos on it, but I'm not sure I'd trust my splice.

Click to expand...

200' of 5/16 ht chain weighs 230 lbs.

Get someone to stand over the anchor locker and see what it does to the trim of the boat.

The boat a boat may already be too heavy in the bow. Isn't there a way to find out if a boat is "floating on her lines"? Perhaps some boats have a crease fore and aft so many inches above where she should be if/when she is trimmed properly. My boat has a little grove like a plank seam about 4" above the WL. May be that's what it's for. I've wondered about it in the past but haven't bothered to find out. One would think a specification of where the WL should be loaded and trimmed properly would/should be standard fare.

Adding several hundred pounds of weight to the bow on a boat already loaded too heavily may make a foul handling boat or even an unsafe boat. If nothing else one could take stock of what apears to be nonstandard equipment on their boat. My Willard came W/O a winch so I'm thinking it was assumed her anchor rode would be hand pulled and only a short length of chain employed. My capstan is so light it's not worth mentioning and my rode is almost certainly as anticipated my her designer. But I'll bet very few Willard's are not W/O lots more chain than most would be happy hauling in by hand. I never thought about it before but the Willard 30 obviously wasn't designed for heavy ground tackle.

Also I'm thinking a good safety feature on a boat is a long rode to keep one off the beach/rocks when you loose power w an onshore wind .. or worse. I have over 400' of line in my rode and take comfort knowing we probably won't be blown ashore. Having that much chain would not be acceptable ... IMO.

We have 200' of all-chain rode. In the PNW, particularly as one goes farther north in BC, 200' is not enough. While we have gotten away with it thus far, when the time comes that we can take longer trips and go farther north we will replace the 200' with 250' or possibly even 300.'

TunaJoe,

We carry 200' of 5/16 chain on our NT32, also with a Lofrans Tigres windlass. Your NT can handle the weight. To balance the bow, I had to re-position the weight bags (crushed granite) in the stern locker, putting a couple of the bags as far back within the swim platform to level things out. We usually anchor out when off our mooring, and in New England, we seldom need to anchor in over 20 feet of water, so we seldom have over 80 feet of anchor out.

Over the years, our galvanized chain is rusting out on the ends. I reverse the chain each season, but even with that, I've been cutting off rusted chain each year. I'm down to about 160' now, and when I get below 120', I'll splice on some 5/8" brait. Picture shows our windlass setup. I mounted the Tigres offset to have a straight, center-line chain run into the chain locker. The Tigres has a port side rope drum. My second, port-side anchor roller carries a 30# folding grappling anchor (or a 20# Bruce), which I use for fishing or a lunch hook. I carry 150' of 5/8" brait for that anchor. You can see the anchor snubber line coming through the chocks.

Tunajoe said:

I'd love to go all chain.
The only hassle is the splice of the rope to chain.
I've watched several videos on it, but I'm not sure I'd trust my splice.

Click to expand...

I haven't tried 8-plait yet, but three-strand splice to chain (shackle splice, or crown splice) is not too tough to learn and it's easy to tell if you've done a good one or not. It should be tight firm and even. Try it a few times, take a good look at the results each time, and you'll get to a point of confidence fairly soon.

I started making decent three-strand splices after meeting Brion Toss (author of Chapman's book of knots) at his booth at the Seattle boat show. With just a few hints he greatly improved my technique.

Some hints:

Suspend the chain so that you can sit with the chain end hanging in front of you roughly at the height of your shoulders. Flatten out each of the three strands after you tie on a constrictor and unlay them - don't keep them twisted and round. Cut their ends into a bit of a taper, and then tape around each end with masking tape making somewhat of a point. After each round of three over and under tucks, roll the splice between your hands to firm it up and even it out, then pull each of the three strands tight, and maybe roll again, before the next round of three tucks. You shouldn't need more than 5-7 rounds of tucks, if they're done right.

Best by far three-strand splicing tool is Brion's Point Hudson Phid - makes it so much easier than a basic fid! The directions for eye splcing that come with it are pretty good even without a book. Google Brion Toss to find his web site.

I don't have as frequent need for an eye splice, but I re-do my rope-to-chain splice annually (Google shackle splice, and you'll find Brion's detailed description). For extra durability, I finish the splice by putting a whipping around the section of the splice where the tapered ends wind up (with the masking tape removed - peeled off as I do the last tuck or two). It looks fairly spiffy, and lasts a summer of anchoring.

Takes maybe 1/2 hour, after you get the hang of it, if you're not in a hurry.

RT Firefly said:

Greetings,
Mr. Tuna. Rather than buying 200' of chain, how about a barrel filled with water to the weight of the chain and put it in the foredeck to see how it might effect performance?

Click to expand...

Thank you!
That's why I love this forum!
Great idea!

Puffin_NT32 said:

TunaJoe,

We carry 200' of 5/16 chain on our NT32, also with a Lofrans Tigres windlass. Your NT can handle the weight. To balance the bow, I had to re-position the weight bags (crushed granite) in the stern locker, putting a couple of the bags as far back within the swim platform to level things out. We usually anchor out when off our mooring, and in New England, we seldom need to anchor in over 20 feet of water, so we seldom have over 80 feet of anchor out.

Over the years, our galvanized chain is rusting out on the ends. I reverse the chain each season, but even with that, I've been cutting off rusted chain each year. I'm down to about 160' now, and when I get below 120', I'll splice on some 5/8" brait. Picture shows our windlass setup. I mounted the Tigres offset to have a straight, center-line chain run into the chain locker. The Tigres has a port side rope drum. My second, port-side anchor roller carries a 30# folding grappling anchor (or a 20# Bruce), which I use for fishing or a lunch hook. I carry 150' of 5/8" brait for that anchor. You can see the anchor snubber line coming through the chocks.

Click to expand...

Thank you Puffin for the detailed explanation.
So you made up your weight bags to even out the "attitude" of your NT?
That's another solution I could consider too

I can't imagine re-positioning my windlass. That must have been quite a job.

Funny, my chain is rusting at the ends too.

Does your anchor pulpit flex when bringing up your anchor? When I bring mine up, even slowly, the anchor pulpit flexes a lot. I've looked underneath to see if a larger piece of aluminum backing plate could be placed, but it doesn't look like an easy job.

Marin said:

We have 200' of all-chain rode. In the PNW, particularly as one goes farther north in BC, 200' is not enough. While we have gotten away with it thus far, when the time comes that we can take longer trips and go farther north we will replace the 200' with 250' or possibly even 300.'

Click to expand...

If you can adapt your windless to chain rode and your chain locker is large enough I would suggest 150 ft of chain and 200f+ft of Braid rode. That way you will hardly ever have to use a snubber and the bow will be lighter.

Although my windlass is currently fine, I can see the BBB designation being an old type of chain. Good point in replacement of windlass to upgrade chain to HT also.

I have been searching for a replacement windlass all winter and found that at least in the horizontal variety suitable for our boat, very few deal with line very well.

Allot of them have a capstan for the line part of the rode, but I have found through personal experience that hauling long lengths of line, with the weight of a large anchor and a hundred feet of chain totaling about 225 lbs is just no fun at all using a capstan if you do it very often, and I do it several times a day when fishing.

The only horizontal windlass in this size range that I've found that even advertises a gypsy that will effectivly handle line and chain both is the Maxwell HRC series.

Thats a big reason we decided to go with an all chain rode. For us going with an all chain rode with our lifting requirements of 300' of chain plus a hundred pound anchor forced us to replace our Muir Cougar windlass with the higher capacity Lofrans Tigrress windlass.

The point is that if you are considering a line/chain combination rode make sure that both you and your windlass are capable of that work in the actual depths you anchor in. I know our requirement to anchor in 300' of water is unusual, but your anchoring conditions need to dictate the gear you choose.

Greetings,
Mr. Tuna. You're most welcome. Glad to be of service. Keep in mind your barrel of water WILL be higher than your rode locker and this may have some effect due to higher center of gravity.

eyschulman said:

If you can adapt your windless to chain rode and your chain locker is large enough I would suggest 150 ft of chain and 200f+ft of Braid rode. That way you will hardly ever have to use a snubber and the bow will be lighter.

Click to expand...

Not quite sure I understand your comment. Out rode is all-chain and our Lofrans Tigres only accepts chain on the wildcat.

Also, for a boat like our PNW boat, we don't believe in using a combination rode. All-chain is the only way to go, in our opinions, and if we feel we need more rode we'll get a longer chain.

Combination rodes are the solution for boats that are tender in the bow, like lighter-weight, semi-planing or planing lobsterboats and the like, and generally for sailboats. But for a 30,000 pound plus cruiser, 200 or 300 feet of chain in the bow of the boat isn't going to make enough difference to notice in terms of trim or handling. That's been our experience at any rate. We have a very effective snubber system and process that helps lower the angle of pull on our anchor and we see no value at all in nylon line or brait in our rode.

Marin said:

Not quite sure I understand your comment. Out rode is all-chain and our Lofrans Tigres only accepts chain on the wildcat.

Also, for a boat like our PNW boat, we don't believe in using a combination rode. All-chain is the only way to go, in our opinions, and if we feel we need more rode we'll get a longer chain.

Combination rodes are the solution for boats that are tender in the bow, like lighter-weight, semi-planing or planing lobsterboats and the like, and generally for sailboats. But for a 30,000 pound plus cruiser, 200 or 300 feet of chain in the bow of the boat isn't going to make enough difference to notice in terms of trim or handling. That's been our experience at any rate. We have a very effective snubber system and process that helps lower the angle of pull on our anchor and we see no value at all in nylon line or brait in our rode.

Click to expand...

Actually I had to remove some chain from my 48 foot 34,000 lb boat to correct trim so I guess some boats do react to weight up front. I also cruise the NW and for the last 16 years a chain rode combination has worked on three different boats. When anchored in 40 ft or more a good portion of the chain does not get to sit on the bottom so why not have some stretch in that part of the system. Perhaps talking chain vs rode is like getting into anchors and people have their strong preferences. Since the A word just came up maybe with the right anchor you don't need as much chain. And then there is the ecology click who would like to get rid of chain scouring the sea bed. Many windlasses allow for wild cat exchange for different chains or combo chain rode and I don't know about your set up.

The chain that is not sitting on the bottom is still adding its weight to lowering the angle of pull on the anchor. The nylon, brait, etc. in a combination rode plays almost no role in this at all.

A snubber has only two values to my way of thinking: taking the pull of the boat off the chain in the bow roller and so prevent it from moving in the roller and transmitting annoying noise into the boat, and providing sone shock absorbing when the conditions kick up enough to pull most of the catenary out of the chain and thus cause shock loads to be transmitted directly to the boat itself.

That's why our snubber set up is designed to allow most of the weight of the deployed all-chain.rode to keep the angle of pull on the anchor as low as possible.