RTF--- You could start a new thread about the sex life of the Edwardian earthworm and if you managed to include the word "anchor" in it, it would end up being some 600 posts long just like all the other ones. The first post would be about the earthworm and the rest would be about anchors.
In the 27,762.5 posts about anchors on this forum so far, I personally think the ONLY one that has any real validity (besides all of mine, of course), is one Eric Henning made at one point.
I'm paraphrasing, but he said that the chances of the typical recreational boater ever experiencing conditions that would seriously tax whatever anchor setup his/her boat has are minimal.
Based on the efforts most [intelligent] recreational boaters go to to avoid being put in dangerous situations, I believe Eric's statement is right on the money. Which means that as long as a boater selects an anchor with a proven track record, the chances are it's going to do just fine almost all the time.
There will be exceptions, of course, like our experience with the Bruce we used to have. But whether one chooses a Rocna, a Manson, a Sarca, a Bruce/Claw, a Danforth/Fortress, a CQR, a Spade, etc., the chances are very high that the boater will never have a real problem.
Sure, they may have to make a couple of tries every now and then to get the anchor to set properly in a squirrely bottom. (It would have been interesting to see how the results of Fortress' mushy mud test would have differed had the anchors that didn't set or didn't set well in the test had been tried again, or tried again using a different setting technique, or tried again in a slightly different place.)
So I agree with Eric, and I think that for the most part the thousands of posts about this, that, or the other anchor and this, that, or the other rode are mostly armchair theorizing and opinionating. Which is loads of fun to do but can be confusing as hell to the poor schmuck who's trying to figure out what to put on the bow of his boat.
So the bottom line for him is, I think, that in recreational boating's real world-- which is the only one that counts--- all of the proven designs seem to work just fine 99 percent of the time if they are used intelligently.
'Intelligently," by the way, includes taking into account the conditions under which the anchor will be used and selecting one that has been proven to do well in those conditions.
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