Windlass & anchoring

The Nylon folks will simply go with 3-1 scope and about 20 ft of chain on the anchor

PLUS!! a rode rider on a seperate line , usually a similar weight to the anchor , but light enough to hand over to recover.

Yes , that's 3 lines in the water , anchor trip buoy , anchor and rode rider . But they seldom get snarled .

Big advantage is the ride is soft /quiet and there in no need to carefully wash/ scrub hundreds of ft of stinking bottom mud off the chain.

The windlass or capstan is ONLY to drag the ground tackle up from the sea floor esp with chain..

The boats engine gets the boat over , and breaks out the anchor.

On deck the break out loads are taken by a chain stopper , as are the usual anchor loads.

THIS -deck chain stopper- is the strong point , not the windlass.

Light nylon 1/4 or 3/8 20ft or more snubbers should tie to bow hawse holes , not over the bow roller . The "best " is to have the snubbers spliced and shakeled to a waterline fitting .


So anchoring say 100ft is let out in 40 ft of water, a SS sail boat snap shakel is snapped to the chain (15 ft long ) and another 20 ft of chain is veered.

Most of the time the light snubber will give a smooth ride , when the chain starts to pull on the deck stopper it gets noisy , and the boat will jerk.

Thats either time to pull in and replace the thin line with thicker , , or veer more chain and reinstall the snubber.

All this is far simpler with nylon , but not in coral.

FF

Our boat's only 26 feet, and it's built heavy, in fact a bit bow-heavy, so we can't handle the weight of all chain.* We cruise the BC and SE Alaska coast, anchoring in 25 to 55 feet and sometimes more.

What works for us is 40' of G4 chain spliced to 300' of New England Ropes 1/2" three-strand, and a 7.5 kg Bruce.* To deal with wear on the splice and the first part of the rope, I reverse and re-splice it roughly once a year, generally cutting off several feet in the process.* The rope lasted eight summers and maybe 350-400 anchorings before it needed replacing.* We like the shock absorption and noiselessness of rope.*

We have a Simpson Lawrence (now Lewmar) Horizon 600 windlass, not by any means an ultra-sturdy unit.* Its gypsy brings in the entire rode, making the transition from rope to chain without assistance more often than not.* In light wind and little or no current, we often use the windlass to bring the boat over to directly above the anchor.* I've been single-handing a lot lately, and this sure makes things simpler.* A small amount of tension and the slight up and down motion of the bow will often break out the anchor with no help from windlass or engine.*

After 500+ nights at anchor in the PNW, in winds greater than 30 knots more than a few times, we have never dragged (after setting the anchor successfully), nor have we ever had any problem with the windlass.* It seems to me that 1.5x a boat length of chain, properly spliced to rope, with regular inspection of the condition of the splice, is a good compromise.

-- Edited by RCook at 09:54, 2009-01-10

-- Edited by RCook at 08:34, 2009-01-11

OK here is another twist in the anchor set ups. When we purchased Penta she still had the original "commercial fish boat" anchoring system. It consisted of a 65# "Forfjord" style anchor, 20 feet of 1/2 inch chain, 20 feet of 3/8 chain all followed by 200 feet of 3/8 gal. wire rope! Believe me that setup stayed where you put it
I soon found that the wire rope was VERY noisy at anchor plus the odd strand was breaking so I replaced it with 300 feet of 1/2 braid. Much quieter. Same chain and anchor!
Penta has what is know locally as an "Annieville" anchor winch that has a drum on it that will accommodate all of this rode and is powered by a surplus DC-3 flap motor that normally ran on 24 volts but now uses 12 volts. Makes it turn at a good speed that is not too fast to keep up with it but still has the power, if the breaker dues not go first, to pull the bow down considerably if the anchor gets fouled. It free wheels down, has a friction break and will dog down on a rachet to hold where you set it. It is bolted thru the deck / deck beams and has two 2X4 oak stringers all with 6 - 1/2 carriage bolts thru for keeping it in place. It will stand the stress of being the only thing securing the anchor although I usually take a couple of turns around the deck cleat to be sure. Around here and up coast where we have done most of our cruising you have to be careful to not get under the old logging cables that are strewn on the bottom of most anchorages here in the PNW.
This set up is definately NOT beautiful to look at but it sure does work!!
John Tones MV Penta
Sidney, BC

Whith hundreds and hundreds of succesful anchorings with nylon*over many years I don't see how anybody can say that an all chain rode is nessessary. In reguard to swinging room chain " seems " better and clearly has a smaller swing radius which*is valuable in waters north of Anacortes. I have seen fish boats anchor for the night by droping a huge Forfjord anchor followed by a lot of very heavy chain and as far as I can tell they are in exactly the same position in the am .. didn't swing at all. Your'e right Marin, the angle of pull on the anchor is more desireable with all chain. Iv'e never used more than 12' of chain and only once have I found myself sit'in on the mud with Sandpipers hop'in around the boat. That was in Seal Cove in Glacier Bay in the 70s. I think if I was caught in a blow off a rocky beach with an engine out chain would look pretty good .. but then it would be so heavy I could have a really really long rode with nylon of the same weight. Perhaps it's easier to just drop a big heavy anchor and chain .. not much skill required.
Mr Spence,
I'm very interested in knowing what exactly you do with the box you put the rode in .. all the rode? .. do you carry it aft .. and stow it where? It's probably similar to what I do. I leave the entire rode in a plastic box on the bow, disconnect the anchor and stow the anchor aft. I prefer not to sleep with the anchor rode and my bow stays light.

Eric Henning*

nomadwilly wrote:

Whith hundreds and hundreds of succesful anchorings with nylon over many years I don't see how anybody can say that an all chain rode is nessessary.....Perhaps it's easier to just drop a big heavy anchor and chain .. not much skill required.

Click to expand...

I don't think an all chain rode is necessary, nor do I think a combination rode is necessary. They both have their advantages and disadvantages, and which one a boater chooses will depend on the conditions he anchors in, what works best on his boat, and what he prefers handling. There may be specific circumstances--- perhaps a sharp coral bottom--- that make one type of rode definitely better than the other type.

We use all-chain because it piles very nicely in the locker with no chance of a loop flopping over and making a "knot" that jams when you next deploy the anchor. It puts more weight on the bottom than a nylon rode. We don't have to deal with hauling in two kinds of rode, or switching from one side of the windlass to the other partway through. It is virtually damage-proof under all the anchoring situations I can anticipate in the area we boat in. Bow weight is not an issue with our boat. Using a snubber and letting out a big loop of chain between the bow pulpit and the snubber plate eliminates all chain noise as the boat swings or tugs on the chain. In crowded or tight anchorages we can shorten up the scope after setting the anchor to a length that I would not trust with a combination rode.

Because of the possibility of hooking sunken logs, chain, or cable in the anchorages in this area that used to contain logging camps, we will use a buoyed trip line on the anchor so we can back it out if it hangs up. But we'd do this regardless of the type of rode we were using.

Our stern anchor and rode are sized to act as the main anchor of the boat if the bottom conditions are better suited for the stern anchor (We put this setup together when we had a Bruce anchor as our main anchor. Now that we've gotten rid of the Bruce the liklihood of using the stern anchor as our main anchor has all but been eliminated.) But the stern rode is a combination rode--- 40 feet of 3/8" chain and a couple hundred feet of the appropriately sized nylon. Like Eric, we keep it in a plastic crate, with a Sunbrella cover my wife made, so we can easily carry it forward and deploy it from the bow if needed.

As to the anchoring skill required, there may be some people who simply dump an anchor and chain rode in a heap on the bottom, but that's not the way we were taught. We lay out our anchor and rode the same way we do with a combination rode and we set the anchor using the same technique.

And that, of course, is the bottom line. It doesn't matter if you use all-chain, wire rope, all nylon, nylon and chain, or woven-together palm fronds. If your anchor stays set and the rode doesn't break, whatever you're using is the right thing to use.



-- Edited by Marin at 16:17, 2009-01-10

Hey Eric,

My anchor rode box, is a plastic clothes basket. When not being used for the anchor rode it is stored under my wifes dirty clothes basket. The main anchor locker has a 4" ID tube about 4' long that goes from the deck to the locker. 3/4" rode being somewhat stiff does not feed into it very well, so when we pull the anchor we put it into the basket and let it dry good then I get down inside the locker and pull the line down into it. The basket is 16 1/2" square by 14" deep. it will hold (stacked) about 100' of line plus the 50' of chain. One reason I decided on the clothes basket was because of all the ventilation holes in it that help the rode dry.

My anchors stay on the bow, that makes it easier for anchoring in the Bahamas, where you frequently use 2 anchors in a "Bahamian Mooring". I keep a third achor rode and smaller anchor in the lazarette I recently got it for a stern anchor.

Jim,

Thanks for the explaination on anchoring. The only thing I'm still wondering about is do you pull the rode down into the locker by yourself or*does someone feed the line down to you? See the picture of us on the bow .. we are almost sitting on the anchor box. I pull the anchor rode and pile it in the box ( 5/8" nylon " Brait " ) including the 10' of 3/8" chain. The*Brait is 350' long. I take the anchor off the chain and stow it aft.
*Marin and Jim,
If you have trouble with the stiffness of 3 strand use Brait. 5/8 Brait costs about $1.65 a foot .. not cheap but it's performance piling and unpiling or comming up out of a chain locker is seamless .. always*without a hitch.

Eric Henning*

nomadwilly wrote:

Jim,*
*Marin and Jim,
If you have trouble with the stiffness of 3 strand use Brait. 5/8 Brait costs about $1.65 a foot .. not cheap but it's performance piling and unpiling or comming up out of a chain locker is seamless .. always*without a hitch.

Click to expand...

You're right about braid, and we use it for all our mooring lines partly for that reason.* However I have never seen it recommended for use in an anchor rode.* I'm not saying it wouldn't work, just that I've never seen it recommended and I've never seen anyone who uses a nylon rode use braided line.* For one thing, I don't believe braid has as much stretch or shock absorbing capabilities as three strand.

But the stiffness of three-strand isn't an issue to me, it's line in general's tendency as it piles up like in an anchor locker to slide around on itself and before you know it a loop has fallen down inside another loop and when you start to pull the rode back out again you have a knot.* Chain can do this too, but it doesn't seem to, at least not in our experience.* Maybe the links tend to hold the pyramid in place....


-- Edited by Marin at 18:18, 2009-01-12

I think he's using Brait line from Yale Cordage. http://www.quickline.us/yaleCordage.asp

I have all chain, no problem with weight in the bow of my boat, it's not noisy, it's easier to clean than 3 strand (never used Brait so I can't speak to that) it holds just fine and I don't care what someone thinks of my "skill" in anchoring. As long as I hold I don't care.

I've only had one boat threaten to damage my boat because they were dragging anchor. Yes, they were "skilled" boaters using 3 strand nylon rode. Fortunately I was still awake and was able to get fenders down, snare their boat properly to get it to lay alongside, raft them to us, use my winch to haul their anchor and listen to them bitch about me rafting to them when they came back from the Bluebird. I offered to untie them if they wanted me to. There were a couple of other boats that had watched the entire event and I was pretty sure that the true story wouldn't be hard to prove.

All the other times, except one the dragging boat was going to miss me and my anchor. The other exciting time was a bump in the night. I got up and went out, fended off the dragger and went to check my line to see that it was secure from the tides action. By the time I got back to the stern the other boat was headed to deep water with no lights on........ I still wonder what they thought when they woke up miles from where they anchored.

Ken

." In reguard to swinging room chain " seems " better and clearly has a smaller swing radius which is valuable in"

In the NE , "Right" coast cruising the water is fairly shallow but can get really busy on weekends .

The Bahama , two anchor set takes almost zero effort and keeps the boat within a few ft of initial set location.

On out 33ft 90/90MS a 12H Danforth , on LUCY the 50 ft lobster style a 20H Danforth is all it takes.

EZ to sleep at night, even in a reversing river.

BTW we never put the nylon anchor rode below. It is simply coiled in a big figure 8 and ready for instant deployment , from the foredeck. With lots of room its never in the way . doesn't smell "low tide" below decks , and can not fail to deploy properly..

FF

Here's my Coot's windlass and bollard.* (Boat is decorating primer paint.)



Betting I will feel secure towards the bow.

(That's Coot #5 ahead.)


-- Edited by markpierce on Tuesday 11th of January 2011 01:56:10 AM

Jim Spence,
I missed your question last month an do have a comment. Marin mentioned it but you must have missed that. I use BRAIT. It's a line developed for anchoring*** ...the only such line that I know of. See 2bucks post. I can't remember for sure but I think it has lots of stretch. My 5/8" Brait is over kill for my boat and 3/4" is probably OKill for yours. I know smaller dia line stretches more so if your concerned about stretch you could change to 5/8" line. But unless you have another reason to change I'd wear out the 3/4" line first.
Another thought is to change the rode line and use it for mooring line where chafing is a big problem. One could use bowlines instead of spliced loops so you can change the size of the loops and/or the length of the lines to insure the line is'nt always at the same spot on the line.