We arrived at the marina after work Friday night and walked the docks at sunset. Susan spotted the thinnest sliver of the new moon over in the western sky. It was to be our marathon bottom-painting weekend and we wanted to spend the nights at the marina so we could get early starts in the mornings. It turned out to be a long, beautiful and productive three days that
included 10, 11 and 12 hour days interspersed with three nights where we collapsed into Gypsy's cabin, alarm set for a 6:30am wake up. After it was all done Susan and I discussed, among many things, blog coverage. Susan suggested that I talk about the anchor and she’d talk about the painting and people. You know, I never wanted to be a news guy and now here I am, an Anchorman. Life has a funny way of playing with you sometimes. So here’s my story - I was live, on the scene in Noank Connecticut when an anchor was actually replaced on pleasure vessel. Please don’t yawn, it’s actually a fascinating story unless you’re not interested in things nautical, in that case you should just glance at the photos and skip the rest of this story because if you are not truly into things nautical this next bit will be about as interesting as watching the paint dry on your boat bottom but that’s another tale so let's move on to my anchor yarn.
In-between the marathon bouts of painting we got the forward chain locker cleaned out and the new Rocna 33 installed. It went better than expected; in fact it went better than I ever would have hoped. It’s such a large anchor I was nervous that it wouldn’t fit our bow roller setup. The common rule of thumb for anchors is a pound of anchor weight for every foot of boat. That would suggest a 42lb anchor, Gypsy 42’ of length. She came with a 45lb Delta Plow but still I wanted more. The plow is a decent type of anchor. I’ve had one before but I found when the conditions get rough the plow does just what its name implies; it plows (drags) which is not a good thing. Also in anchors, bigger is better; along with up-sizing I also wanted to switch to a newer design so we picked up a Rocna 33; 73lbs of bottom grabbing galvanized steel.
Gypsy's original inventory included 250' of 5/16 anchor chain. We pulled all the chain out to verify and inspect it, all 300lbs of it and to clean out the bottom of the chain locker. We were surprised what we found under all that chain, no, it wasn't Jimmy Hoffa but another 140lbs of old chain and old nylon rode. We dumped all the old stuff next to the boat with a "free" sign and it disappeared by the end of the day; the nylon line to a frugal boater and the old chain to the local dumpster pickers.
Our new Rocna anchor is a spade type anchor with a roll bar. I’ve had a spade anchor before and really liked it. It also performed like its name implied; it dug in and held like mad. The Rocna takes the spade design one step further by adding the distinctive roll bar over the top to facilitate setting if the anchor should ever end up all cattywampus on the bottom. If you’ve read this far you probably are truly interested in boating details and might enjoy going to the Rocna web site and watching their video about the Rocna anchor that discusses its design features and compares it to other common anchor types. The last thing we did anchor wise this weekend was to shackle and safely wire the chain to the new anchor and then spliced 200’ of new 3/4” nylon line to the end of the chain to increase our deep water anchoring capability. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming. Thank you and good night.
187 days...
