Anchoring to stay put: advice from a fearful sailor
As you sail further from home, as you must when you head out for an ocean passage, you will probably spend more time at anchor than you used to, or more time anchored in places that you used to consider marginal at best and downright dangerous at worst. Of course you will. Anchoring lets you go to those remote places like little fishing ports that have always lived with the sea but have not yet started to live with modern yachting, or to take shelter behind a headland when you need to rest. Apart from less noise and shore dirt and greater privacy I love anchoring because laying an anchor is much less trouble than bringing a boat alongside, setting fenders, running bow and stern and spring lines and then attending these lines. But how best to anchor so that you feel comfortable going ashore or can sleep an undisturbed night?
Here is a rule of thumb for many things, not just anchoring. When there are many ways to do something and they all attract vociferous supporters and opponents, this is a sign that mankind hasn’t yet arrived at the one that always works best. Anchoring is a wonderful case in point. There are so many opinions on anchors and anchoring that you can be sure there is no fool proof way of doing it. The first aim of course is not to drag later and especially not in the middle of the night. The second aim is to be able to recover the anchor at a speed appropriate to your need to clear out of the now uncomfortable spot. So whose opinion do you take? Certainly not the sailor who says he or she has never dragged their anchor. That just means one of two things: first, they haven’t anchored enough times yet, not that they have a proven method; second, they have highly selective memory.
One of the lions of ocean cruising wrote that he had never dragged anchor. He was elderly by then and I wondered whether he meant he never dragged after he discovered the need to always lay out five hundred feet of half inch chain, even in thirty feet of water. Five hundred feet in shallow water should do it! I recalled a magazine article he had written in his youth. An exciting account of escaping grounding on a beach after his anchor dragged. Great reading. I shall never forget it. Seems he did.
My view is that dragging an anchor is the natural consequence of anchoring. If it isn’t your anchor that’s dragging it will be someone else’s and if you can't see a boat sliding by just now another one will be along in a minute. So my advice is better than most, because I’ve had plenty of experience of dragging anchors and not all have been mine.
Look at your ground tackle with a critical eye. If it was designed for coastal sailing it is unlikely to be heavy enough. And you may not have enough of it.
In your coastal sailing days carrying two anchors might have been plenty but now you need three or four. On our heavy old Petronella we carried four substantial anchors and a lightweight kedge which I hadn’t seen in years. For main anchor we used one of our two 45lb CQRs and kept a 65lb fisherman anchor ready on our second bow roller. I don’t know how we would have managed with only one bow roller. The real brute lived in pieces in the bilge and I assembled it once just to make sure I could.
Different bottoms need different types of anchors, which is a good reason to carry more than one type of anchor. The other reason to carry several anchors is that you may lose one just when you need to re-anchor securely.
Weight isn’t everything because the surface area of the flukes is also vital to achieve grip but heavier ground tackle is still good insurance. Sailors writing articles in magazines often have strongly expressed views on their recent investment in a wonder anchor of new design and hi-tech construction. Beware. The forefront of technology isn’t always a comfortable place to sit. Blue water live-aboards are often more conservative than the article-writing sailors. They can't afford the new designs and they have learnt to favour an anchor that is effective in most conditions even if never the best in any one of them.
I carry no torch for the CQR. It is what came with the boat, which by the time we bought her had made about ten Atlantic crossings. CQRs are what we see on the bows of boats like us. So it came as no great surprise that a survey of long-term cruisers found the CQR to be the anchor of choice and that the preferred weight was always much heavier than recommended in the data sheets of almanacs or even by the makers of the anchors. The reason for this, so I have been told, is that, numerically, more boats are used in coastal or inland waters or in reach of a safe haven and are unlikely to face the strong winds that us long distance cruisers meet after travelling weeks to arrive in some barely indented bay. The data sheets are for them, not us.
Our 45lb CQR is as heavy as we see on boats ten feet longer but I thought we needed a 60lb CQR or its equivalent as our main anchor. The message is this: if you want to sleep easy, put down the heaviest anchor you can handle and don’t bother with calculations of minimal acceptable weights. Make the heaviest anchor you can handle your main anchor. Bad weather always comes in the early hours of a dark and rainy night and this is not the time to be messing around laying second anchors. In extreme conditions, of course, you will need a really heavy anchor, possibly a brute that has to be brought up out of the bilges in its components. But when extreme weather is on its way you will probably get plenty of warning.
The CQR, like all ploughs, needs to wriggle and worm its way underground, mainly through the action of the sea and chain. The CQR likes to be on a long scope and I like to sleep easy thinking of the deep catenary doing much of the work and certainly not jerking me or Mr Secure upright in the gusts of the night, so we usually lie on a heavy chain scope closer to 5:1 than 3:1. Despite this and the holding power claimed for the CQR the anchor has dragged so many times in the awkward places we have chosen to anchor that we now lay it down like a rare piece of porcelain. We do not drop our anchor. That is too careless a description of what we do.
Ploughs need time to settle. When you drop the anchor and chain in a bundle and motor back to set it all you usually achieve is a shallow furrow with your plough lying tastefully on top of it. When you have selected your anchoring spot, overshoot by a boat length. Let the boat drop back slowly as you lay the anchor on the bottom and feed out the chain bit by bit until you have enough out for the depth of water. Then take five minutes or more to tidy up the deck, put on sail covers, debate the meaning of life and sit up on the bow admiring the scenery in general but some stable transit in particular. From time to time lay your bare hand on the anchor rode as it comes taut. You can almost always feel if the anchor is dragging and, if it is, re-anchor now rather than after the rest of the palaver. When you have waited twice as long as you first thought and your transits are steady you may now use the engine to set the anchor. But come back easy. The point is not to see how many horse powers it takes to drag the thing back to the surface. Your anchor just needs a little encouragement from you to dig in deeper and the rest is up to its designer.
We encourage our CQR to stay set by two little tricks:
We like the CQR design for its holding power and versatility but we do not love it blindly. There are some days when we don’t like it at all. We replaced the CQR on ferro Petronella with a Bruce, back when the Bruce was the magic anchor holding oil rigs in place, and it was good unless the chain made a vertical pull, at which the Bruce hopped out of the ground like a flea. In the Joshua-Petronella years searching for a drag-proof anchor still light enough to handle we have taken great interest in innovative designs. What has surprised us most is how many new designs there have been in the last ten to 15 years, given how long mankind has been putting to sea in boats. Often they are developments of familiar designs such as spade and plough and fisherman, changing a key dimension or making use of new metals such as the light but high tensile alloys of aluminium magnesium used in the Danforth-style Fortress. Others, like the Bügelanker from Germany and the strange looking Sarca from Australia, are more radical ideas. Some, unfortunately, are just cheaper copies of designs no longer covered by patent. The point is that each type of anchor has its strengths and weaknesses. Improving an anchor’s ability to do what it does best doesn’t mean you gain in the things it isn’t designed to do. You still must choose an anchor for the particular conditions.
So many new designs come out and yet information on their performance is poor and much of the published research is confusing. Tests are often badly designed so that, for example, the holding power of a ship-style anchor or a fisherman-type anchor on a sandy bottom is compared to a broad fluked yacht anchor. A ship-style anchor needs to be very heavy to work, which is why you never see them on a yacht. A fisherman anchor, even the improved Herreshoff version, needs very broad flukes to hold in sand or mud. That isn’t where you would choose to use it. Such tests are inherently biased, possibly deliberately so. Be critical of test data. Is like being compared with like? Was the test method rigorous and appropriate? Be cautious of any new and therefore relatively untried design which comes out well ahead of the others in all tests in all conditions. Best of all, now that you are a long-distance sailor, talk to other sailors.
Two tests by major anchor manufacturers resonated with me. First, the test boats often failed to get the anchor to hold well enough to even begin the test. And they were experts. Imagine how often we ordinary mortals are likely to fail? The man said: “You can never repeat the test or be sure what has happened. With anchoring you get good, bad and terrible days.” Just like real life. Second, seabed videos of the way the anchor set showed that often the beast behaved in an unlikely or unpredicted manner. An anchor that gripped would later drag, for no obvious reason. Some are designed for a particular seabed but since we usually can't see the seabed most of us settle for the best on average. Make this your watch word: never assume it will hold, even if it has held all week in gales.
What tests do we want? Straight line pull is a good one but sadly is often the only test that you will read about because this is the one that can be done in an hour from a test boat. You, the user, want to know how willing an anchor is to reset after current or tide or wind changes but this is not a quick or simple thing to observe. The best test of all is the test of time. Over time you can measure things like the anchor’s resistance to shock loads and twist, things you may not immediately think of when you imagine your anchor down there on a dark and stormy night, but they are part of the stressful life an anchor must lead. I didn’t really appreciate what such loadings could do until we pulled up the remains of our very own river mooring.
G and I carried out an objective and scientific test on the relative holding power of our 45lb CQR and our 65lb fisherman. We didn’t intend to but that is what it turned out to be. We had made a mooring on a Spanish river putting each anchor on opposite ends of a long length of heavy chain and connected Petronella to a half inch chain riser from the centre. Two months later we struggled to retrieve the mooring from the muddy bottom. The CQR was still tidy on its chain. The fisherman had knitted a great convulsion of metal. It had been pulled towards the CQR, twisting and knotting the chain as it went and bending the anchor shank casting. It was the opposite of what we had expected.
I find myself more aware of the many broken anchors hidden away in boat yards. They weren’t all poorly made cheap copies of those old designs whose patents have expired. Not that it’s easy to tell a cheap copy. Some of the much-respected New Zealand Rocnar anchors were breaking after the shank was made from a grade of steel not sanctioned by the manufacturer. The new steel was Chinese specification Q420 with 40% less resistance to twisting and bending. Rocnar offered replacements but how do you know you have the sub-spec anchor? The bad steel versions had the maker’s name and the weight embossed on them, just like the good steel ones. I suppose you’ll know you’ve got a dud when it comes up bent.
Do you remember the 246 foot Mirabella V, the world’s largest private sailing yacht, lost in 2005 in the usually tranquil Villefranche-sur-Mer near Nice? Her “High Holding Power” design anchor broke out. As she briefly ranged around in the suddenly strengthening and changing breeze before grounding on rocks the forces were so great that the shank of her 1,300lb anchor bent. That is not an easy thing to do. Perhaps the owner had bought a cheap knock-off but it seems unlikely to me that the £100million Mirabella would skimp on anchors or chain. Something wasn’t right for the circumstances. At that time we were about to buy a cheap copy of the high-holding power Bruce-type anchor. Not now. We shall just lay out more half inch chain more often.
From Your First Atlantic Crossing, 4th edition
As you sail further from home, as you must when you head out for an ocean passage, you will probably spend more time at anchor than you used to, or more time anchored in places that you used to consider marginal at best and downright dangerous at worst. Of course you will. Anchoring lets you go to those remote places like little fishing ports that have always lived with the sea but have not yet started to live with modern yachting, or to take shelter behind a headland when you need to rest. Apart from less noise and shore dirt and greater privacy I love anchoring because laying an anchor is much less trouble than bringing a boat alongside, setting fenders, running bow and stern and spring lines and then attending these lines. But how best to anchor so that you feel comfortable going ashore or can sleep an undisturbed night?
Here is a rule of thumb for many things, not just anchoring. When there are many ways to do something and they all attract vociferous supporters and opponents, this is a sign that mankind hasn’t yet arrived at the one that always works best. Anchoring is a wonderful case in point. There are so many opinions on anchors and anchoring that you can be sure there is no fool proof way of doing it. The first aim of course is not to drag later and especially not in the middle of the night. The second aim is to be able to recover the anchor at a speed appropriate to your need to clear out of the now uncomfortable spot. So whose opinion do you take? Certainly not the sailor who says he or she has never dragged their anchor. That just means one of two things: first, they haven’t anchored enough times yet, not that they have a proven method; second, they have highly selective memory.
One of the lions of ocean cruising wrote that he had never dragged anchor. He was elderly by then and I wondered whether he meant he never dragged after he discovered the need to always lay out five hundred feet of half inch chain, even in thirty feet of water. Five hundred feet in shallow water should do it! I recalled a magazine article he had written in his youth. An exciting account of escaping grounding on a beach after his anchor dragged. Great reading. I shall never forget it. Seems he did.
My view is that dragging an anchor is the natural consequence of anchoring. If it isn’t your anchor that’s dragging it will be someone else’s and if you can't see a boat sliding by just now another one will be along in a minute. So my advice is better than most, because I’ve had plenty of experience of dragging anchors and not all have been mine.
Look at your ground tackle with a critical eye. If it was designed for coastal sailing it is unlikely to be heavy enough. And you may not have enough of it.
In your coastal sailing days carrying two anchors might have been plenty but now you need three or four. On our heavy old Petronella we carried four substantial anchors and a lightweight kedge which I hadn’t seen in years. For main anchor we used one of our two 45lb CQRs and kept a 65lb fisherman anchor ready on our second bow roller. I don’t know how we would have managed with only one bow roller. The real brute lived in pieces in the bilge and I assembled it once just to make sure I could.
Different bottoms need different types of anchors, which is a good reason to carry more than one type of anchor. The other reason to carry several anchors is that you may lose one just when you need to re-anchor securely.
Weight isn’t everything because the surface area of the flukes is also vital to achieve grip but heavier ground tackle is still good insurance. Sailors writing articles in magazines often have strongly expressed views on their recent investment in a wonder anchor of new design and hi-tech construction. Beware. The forefront of technology isn’t always a comfortable place to sit. Blue water live-aboards are often more conservative than the article-writing sailors. They can't afford the new designs and they have learnt to favour an anchor that is effective in most conditions even if never the best in any one of them.
I carry no torch for the CQR. It is what came with the boat, which by the time we bought her had made about ten Atlantic crossings. CQRs are what we see on the bows of boats like us. So it came as no great surprise that a survey of long-term cruisers found the CQR to be the anchor of choice and that the preferred weight was always much heavier than recommended in the data sheets of almanacs or even by the makers of the anchors. The reason for this, so I have been told, is that, numerically, more boats are used in coastal or inland waters or in reach of a safe haven and are unlikely to face the strong winds that us long distance cruisers meet after travelling weeks to arrive in some barely indented bay. The data sheets are for them, not us.
Our 45lb CQR is as heavy as we see on boats ten feet longer but I thought we needed a 60lb CQR or its equivalent as our main anchor. The message is this: if you want to sleep easy, put down the heaviest anchor you can handle and don’t bother with calculations of minimal acceptable weights. Make the heaviest anchor you can handle your main anchor. Bad weather always comes in the early hours of a dark and rainy night and this is not the time to be messing around laying second anchors. In extreme conditions, of course, you will need a really heavy anchor, possibly a brute that has to be brought up out of the bilges in its components. But when extreme weather is on its way you will probably get plenty of warning.
The CQR, like all ploughs, needs to wriggle and worm its way underground, mainly through the action of the sea and chain. The CQR likes to be on a long scope and I like to sleep easy thinking of the deep catenary doing much of the work and certainly not jerking me or Mr Secure upright in the gusts of the night, so we usually lie on a heavy chain scope closer to 5:1 than 3:1. Despite this and the holding power claimed for the CQR the anchor has dragged so many times in the awkward places we have chosen to anchor that we now lay it down like a rare piece of porcelain. We do not drop our anchor. That is too careless a description of what we do.
Ploughs need time to settle. When you drop the anchor and chain in a bundle and motor back to set it all you usually achieve is a shallow furrow with your plough lying tastefully on top of it. When you have selected your anchoring spot, overshoot by a boat length. Let the boat drop back slowly as you lay the anchor on the bottom and feed out the chain bit by bit until you have enough out for the depth of water. Then take five minutes or more to tidy up the deck, put on sail covers, debate the meaning of life and sit up on the bow admiring the scenery in general but some stable transit in particular. From time to time lay your bare hand on the anchor rode as it comes taut. You can almost always feel if the anchor is dragging and, if it is, re-anchor now rather than after the rest of the palaver. When you have waited twice as long as you first thought and your transits are steady you may now use the engine to set the anchor. But come back easy. The point is not to see how many horse powers it takes to drag the thing back to the surface. Your anchor just needs a little encouragement from you to dig in deeper and the rest is up to its designer.
We encourage our CQR to stay set by two little tricks:
- a snubber of thick nylon line to take up snatch. This needs to be 20 or 30 feet long to work in really snatchy conditions.
- a weight on the anchor chain to increase the catenary effect. We don’t bother with running an “angel” or “chum”, as these weights are called. That is too much trouble to recover in the many crises my imagination conjures up. We just run a big loop of anchor chain behind the rope snubber. We wind this up on the windlass like any other anchor chain.
We like the CQR design for its holding power and versatility but we do not love it blindly. There are some days when we don’t like it at all. We replaced the CQR on ferro Petronella with a Bruce, back when the Bruce was the magic anchor holding oil rigs in place, and it was good unless the chain made a vertical pull, at which the Bruce hopped out of the ground like a flea. In the Joshua-Petronella years searching for a drag-proof anchor still light enough to handle we have taken great interest in innovative designs. What has surprised us most is how many new designs there have been in the last ten to 15 years, given how long mankind has been putting to sea in boats. Often they are developments of familiar designs such as spade and plough and fisherman, changing a key dimension or making use of new metals such as the light but high tensile alloys of aluminium magnesium used in the Danforth-style Fortress. Others, like the Bügelanker from Germany and the strange looking Sarca from Australia, are more radical ideas. Some, unfortunately, are just cheaper copies of designs no longer covered by patent. The point is that each type of anchor has its strengths and weaknesses. Improving an anchor’s ability to do what it does best doesn’t mean you gain in the things it isn’t designed to do. You still must choose an anchor for the particular conditions.
So many new designs come out and yet information on their performance is poor and much of the published research is confusing. Tests are often badly designed so that, for example, the holding power of a ship-style anchor or a fisherman-type anchor on a sandy bottom is compared to a broad fluked yacht anchor. A ship-style anchor needs to be very heavy to work, which is why you never see them on a yacht. A fisherman anchor, even the improved Herreshoff version, needs very broad flukes to hold in sand or mud. That isn’t where you would choose to use it. Such tests are inherently biased, possibly deliberately so. Be critical of test data. Is like being compared with like? Was the test method rigorous and appropriate? Be cautious of any new and therefore relatively untried design which comes out well ahead of the others in all tests in all conditions. Best of all, now that you are a long-distance sailor, talk to other sailors.
Two tests by major anchor manufacturers resonated with me. First, the test boats often failed to get the anchor to hold well enough to even begin the test. And they were experts. Imagine how often we ordinary mortals are likely to fail? The man said: “You can never repeat the test or be sure what has happened. With anchoring you get good, bad and terrible days.” Just like real life. Second, seabed videos of the way the anchor set showed that often the beast behaved in an unlikely or unpredicted manner. An anchor that gripped would later drag, for no obvious reason. Some are designed for a particular seabed but since we usually can't see the seabed most of us settle for the best on average. Make this your watch word: never assume it will hold, even if it has held all week in gales.
What tests do we want? Straight line pull is a good one but sadly is often the only test that you will read about because this is the one that can be done in an hour from a test boat. You, the user, want to know how willing an anchor is to reset after current or tide or wind changes but this is not a quick or simple thing to observe. The best test of all is the test of time. Over time you can measure things like the anchor’s resistance to shock loads and twist, things you may not immediately think of when you imagine your anchor down there on a dark and stormy night, but they are part of the stressful life an anchor must lead. I didn’t really appreciate what such loadings could do until we pulled up the remains of our very own river mooring.
G and I carried out an objective and scientific test on the relative holding power of our 45lb CQR and our 65lb fisherman. We didn’t intend to but that is what it turned out to be. We had made a mooring on a Spanish river putting each anchor on opposite ends of a long length of heavy chain and connected Petronella to a half inch chain riser from the centre. Two months later we struggled to retrieve the mooring from the muddy bottom. The CQR was still tidy on its chain. The fisherman had knitted a great convulsion of metal. It had been pulled towards the CQR, twisting and knotting the chain as it went and bending the anchor shank casting. It was the opposite of what we had expected.
I find myself more aware of the many broken anchors hidden away in boat yards. They weren’t all poorly made cheap copies of those old designs whose patents have expired. Not that it’s easy to tell a cheap copy. Some of the much-respected New Zealand Rocnar anchors were breaking after the shank was made from a grade of steel not sanctioned by the manufacturer. The new steel was Chinese specification Q420 with 40% less resistance to twisting and bending. Rocnar offered replacements but how do you know you have the sub-spec anchor? The bad steel versions had the maker’s name and the weight embossed on them, just like the good steel ones. I suppose you’ll know you’ve got a dud when it comes up bent.
Do you remember the 246 foot Mirabella V, the world’s largest private sailing yacht, lost in 2005 in the usually tranquil Villefranche-sur-Mer near Nice? Her “High Holding Power” design anchor broke out. As she briefly ranged around in the suddenly strengthening and changing breeze before grounding on rocks the forces were so great that the shank of her 1,300lb anchor bent. That is not an easy thing to do. Perhaps the owner had bought a cheap knock-off but it seems unlikely to me that the £100million Mirabella would skimp on anchors or chain. Something wasn’t right for the circumstances. At that time we were about to buy a cheap copy of the high-holding power Bruce-type anchor. Not now. We shall just lay out more half inch chain more often.
From Your First Atlantic Crossing, 4th edition
