Keep it Simple: Anchoring Without Math

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!