All About Our Anchors

On our boat we currently have two anchors mounted at the bow.  One is a 25 pound S1600 Danforth which is a little undersized for our boat.  It's attached to a 20' long 3/8" chain lead and 230' of 3/4" rope (rode in sailor speak).  Actually, according to Wikipedia, "rode" is a term for both rope or chain or both when it's attached to an anchor.  The rope is marked off in 30' lengths with green flags that are woven into the braid.  This is a nice set-up that is easy to clean when pulled up off the bottom and when it's set it holds well.  We've used it to hold us in 30 to 40 knot winds that blew all night from all points of the compass and it never broke free.  This anchor has served us well in most situations on the Chesapeake Bay where the bottom is mostly mud.  The few times it's failed, just wouldn't bite in, was when the bottom was covered with dead leaves over clay and oyster shells.  Our other anchor is a 44 pound Bruce attached to 300' of 3/8" chain.  The chain was originally marked in 30' lengths with different colored wire ties but they got brittle and fell off and then you couldn't tell how much chain you had out.  While the boat was on the hard at Hinckley last Winter I painted 1' lengths of chain with florescent yellow and green every 25', one band of yellow for every 25' and one band of green for every 100'.  The Bruce has been very dependable and always digs in.  The only reason I don't use it all the time is because the chain drags up mud that has to be washed off before being stowed in the chain locker.

We have a deck wash-down system that includes an anemic water pump that feeds a hose up to a deck fitting at the bow.  We plug a plastic 50' coiled hose into this and use it to rinse off the anchor and chain as it comes up.  It's a pretty wimpy system though and I've been eyeballing a pump that's rated at 70 psi and 7.5 gpm.  When we build our water maker we'll tie into the same thru-hull that supplies the wash down pump and set it up so we have a choice of using salt or fresh water for washing the boat.  This'll come in handy when we're ocean sailing because everything gets crusty with salt and you really need fresh water to clean it off.  I also plan to go to a regular garden hose instead of that crappy coiled plastic tubing.  Within one season the tubing develops pin holes and you get water spraying all over the place.  The fittings on it restrict the flow too.  A garden hose would take up more room but would flow better and last longer.

La Vida Dulce is designed with a chain locker that takes up about the first 7' in length of the boat.  This is in the bow so the space below decks is V shaped and pretty tight.  It's divided up into two bins side-by-side up forward and one bin behind.  The chain and rope drop down through two open holes in the deck so any water that gets in here drains overboard.  We've buried the bow in waves so a good amount of water must get in there.  The rope connected to the Danforth is on the port side, chain for the Bruce is starboard.  There's a board with a divider down the middle that lays across the front of the two forward bins and it's purpose is for when the chain (or rope) is dropping down into the bin it will slide down this board first.  This prevents the chain (or rope) from piling up and creating problems during anchoring operations.  The divider ensures the chain (or rope) goes into the appropriate bin.  The third bin stretches across behind the front two and creates a nice wet locker with plenty of room for rain gear, mops, etc.

As long as we've had the boat we've had trouble with mold and mildew up in the chain locker.  It's always damp up there and air circulation is pretty poor.  We checked it this Spring and found it had gotten out of control and this is what instigated our boat bombing that I mentioned a few weeks ago.  The mildew bomb did a great job of killing all the mold and mildew on the boat, including up in the chain locker.  You still have to clean up the dead mildew though.  This past weekend Cheri and I spent hours scrubbing down the chain locker with bleach based cleaners.  This is not a comfortable space to work in, let me tell ya.  There is no flat surface to stand, even if you could stand in there, which you can't because there's only about 3' or 4' of headroom.  You have to lay across the tops of the three bins and reach into spaces that were never meant to be touched by human beings.  This is a job for an Orangutan!  After we scrubbed it down three times we painted it white with a mildew resistant bilge paint.  It looks really great now and our boat smells fresh and clean.  It'll be really nice if it lasts for more than just a few weeks.

Before we take off for shores unknown we plan to move the Danforth anchor to the stern and attach it to 300' of 3/4" rope mounted on a spool in the cockpit locker.  We'll replace it with the Bruce on the chain and rode up in the bow along with a new Rocna 33 (73 pound anchor) on 300' of 3/8" chain.