After five summers of cruising down the coast of California from San Francisco to San Diego and back home again, we've addopted the perspective that keeping things simple is the best way to spend more time enjoying your cruising and less time thinking too hard or fixing broken equipment. In this entry I want to talk about Anchoring, possibly the most fraught topic in boating culture. If punches are thrown in a cruiser's bar, it's probably because two people have strong and opposite opinions about anchoring. With that, let me add one more opinion to the mix: chain and rode lengths.

When I started thinking about how much chain I wanted versus how much rode, we had a Catalina 30, and had already wrapped our rode around the back of our keel in the San Francisco Bay where you get opposing and variable wind and currents as a matter of course: I'm not sure which level of cruiser hell it is, but it's got it's own level for sure. One solution is to add a kellet to the line to hold it down below the depth of the keel, but then you need to cary a heavy weight onboard that only has one job, and takes some thinking when used (where to attach it to the line before letting down to a given depth).

Another solution to anchoring that many adopt is to go for 100% chain. But the downsides are that you have a massive amount of weight in your bow reducing performance of your boat (even a quarter of a knot over a 60-70 NM can mean the difference of coming in before of after dark), and you now need to create a snubber for the chain to avoid shock-loading your windlass.

Rather than going the traditional route of approximately one boat-length to half a boat-length of chain with the rest as rode (I think this comes down to maintaining sufficient catenary force... look it up), or all chain, I asked myself what would be the most simple method of anchoring. I took a process approach rather than a 100% physics approach or a 100% nervous approach. Here are the results of that different approach:

The simplest thing for me was to presume that we'll always be aiming to anchor in 15-20 ft. of water If I anchor with approximately 5:1 scope, all I do is let out my anchor and the 75 ft. of chain I have attached to it until it stops pulling. that's 4 lengths of chain on the ground, and one length of rode running up to the boat. Done. No math, tons of holding strength, no wrapped keels, less weight in the bow than 100% chain, no need for any extra gear like a snubber or a kellet, and a very easy process.

That's today's tip from me about keeping it simple. I hope it helps. We've enjoyed this approach to anchoring, and I hope you will too!

If you've ever done any basic level of cruising on your boat, you likely have a binder, folder, photos on your phone, or just a pile in the chart table composed of your proof of registration and your insurance, maybe even a photo of your boat. All this is kept organized (or not organized) so that when you check in to a marina you can give them those documents to make copies of. Even for your long term slip rental where you store your boat, the marina will want to keep an up-to-date copy of your registration and insurance on file.

After coming back to our home port in San Francisco Bay following a summer cruising in Southern California, a friend and I started talking about the inconvenience and analog style of cruising, and in particular maintaining and communicating documents to marinas along the way. As with most inconveniences in the San Francisco area, the next statement is "there should be an app for that!" In this case there was no perfect app for that, so we decided to make it.

Of course the app would include a place to store documentation, but that's not all it would need to do in order to truly live up to the potential we saw. It would also need to be a place cruisers go to for all the other inconveniences of owning a boat. Other apps tried in a piecemeal fashion to solve these individual needs, but our goal was and is to pull it all together into one place: a place to take the things that make boating suck, and create a tool to make it suck less.

It took some time to find a technical co-founder who could help us build the product, but when we did, we knew it was a perfect fit! He owns a boat and knows how to sail, and he's familiar with the administrative and technical inconveniences of owning a boat, so he was a perfect fit to work with us to build the platform.

Jump ahead to present day, and we have a platform that includes a cruising guide aimed at being a resource of quality information; we have a maintenance log where you can enter all the maintenance information you want to keep track of, including boat-specific fields like engine hours; we have a personal log where you can write down your hours on the water, who you were with, and what boat you were on, which can help those who are tracking hours for a course or a captain's license; and of course, we've included a document safe where you can keep all your documents in one place, ready to share with whatever marina you're checking in to.

That's not the whole picture though, you can also find boats for sale on Yachty List, and as more marinas partner with us and support slip reservation via Yachty, you'll be able to book slips directly through Yachty for those marinas. Right now you can buy, manage, cruise, and sell a boat through Yachty. Our goal is to notice all those little things in each of those activities that can make owning and using your boat suck, and to make them suck less so you can spend more time enjoying your life on the water.

Sign up for Yachty for just $24 a year and get access to all the features on the platform, and start making your life on the water that much easier.