I find it curious with all the disagreements in thousands of anchoring threads throughout the internet by competent cruisers that anyone can be seen as an authority on the subject.
In fact, some pretty simple testing and modeling by contemporary people with good experience and reputations are showing how some "boating experts" of yesteryear maybe relied too much on reputation and experience and little on science.
Now don't get me wrong....experience says a lot...but lots of experience doesn't always mean depth of knowledge.
Hopefully my boating friends who don't cruise respect my advice on anchoring....but...I tell them I have little experience in heavy weather anchoring because I don't expose myself to it. I feel ready for it, just don't want to experience it so I use my other skills to avoid it.
So I really wonder how valuable all these books and articles really are on a subject that is almost never agreed upon by people I trust that have lots of experience too...other than some very basics (easily picked up for free almost anywhere) and variations of anchoring (easily read on internet).
Heck, from tackle, techniques and even the anchorages themselves are almost always disagreed on.
Like many subjects here.