Thread: New Anchor
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Old 03-31-2008, 11:52 AM   #13
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
City: -
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
RE: New Anchor

Mark---

In this area a lot of bays have a dense, slimy, mud that has the consistency of soft modeling clay. Many boaters, including us, use all-chain rode because we also have a lot of rocky bottoms. In the mud, the chain that's been lying in it comes up completely coated. It's almost hard to distinguish the individual links. And our anchor, a Rocna, while it holds like the devil, is a spade anchor so it brings up a huge "spadeful" of mud.

It is imperative that you have a washdown pump to hose off the chain and anchor as they come in. The mud, when it dries, comes off the chain as a fine, almost powder-like material that gets all over everything the next time you deploy the chain. Our chain locker is very well ventilated and any mud left on the chain dries very quickly. So we've never experienced (yet) any sort of odor problem. But we hose off the chain as it comes aboard as best we can.

Our boat has an AC Westinghouse/Jabsco 26 gpm salt water pump that is plumbed to connections on the fore and aft deck. However the pump is out of the boat right now for overhaul and painting, so we're reduced to using the freshwater outlet on the exterior of the cabin for hosing off the anchor chain. Even with a squirt nozzle, the pressure is barely enough to remove the mud. So if you install a washdown pump on our boat (if it doesn't already have one) get a powerful one.

-- Edited by Marin at 13:53, 2008-03-31
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