Anchoring is a great way to get away with your friends and family and explore uninhabited locations. Plus it’s a lot cheaper than staying at marinas.
But lots of people are nervous about anchoring, and wonder how exactly that chunk of steel hanging from the bow keeps your boat in one place? Many people find it to be a bit of a mystery, and that doesn’t help with their nervousness.
You really want to be confident in your anchoring in order to get a good night sleep, or if you’re leaving your boat to explore some remote islands, especially if the wind picks up.
So I wanted to show you exactly how an anchor behaves on the sea floor. I found a nice popular anchorage where the tide had gone out, exposing the same sandy bottom that the boats in the distance are anchoring in, so we can see exactly what is going on, without the sea being in the way.
The worst thing to do is to simply throw your anchor and chain overboard in a heap and hope for the best. That is literally just rolling the dice.
Instead you want to lower your anchor to the seabed, and then lay the chain along the bottom.
You want the pull on the anchor to be almost horizontal, and for that you need to measure the distance from the bow roller to the seabed at high tide, and pay out at least five times that much chain, which is known as 5:1 scope, so the anchor and chain lies along the seabed.
Without enough chain the pull will be too vertical and the anchor will just drag along, until you let out enough chain to get the horizontal pull. If the anchor is set, but you didn’t let out enough chain and the tide goes up, your anchor could pull out.
But with 5:1 scope the anchor should stay buried with gradual wind and tide shifts
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More drastic shifts might even pull the anchor out, but it should reset with enough scope.
So the secret is having that 5:1 scope. Of course your anchor could be fouled with kelp or an old shoe, but the first thing you should try if your anchor is not staying put is letting out more chain.
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