In article ,
Wayne.B wrote:

On Mon, 12 Feb 2007 18:05:53 GMT, "NE Sailboat"
wrote:

Wayne ,, if I use oversize chain ,, to say the anchor size .. will this be
to my advantage. I have a plow and it sits up front in a roller which was
designed for it.. Maybe adding a heavy chaine would give me some advantage.

It would probably help with getting the anchor set more quickly if you
used something like 15 ft of 3/8ths or 5/16ths chain since it will
lower the effective angle of pull on the anchor in lightly loaded
conditions.

We did that in Key West with the 30 pound Danforth using 30 ft of
3/8ths and it was very effective. That would be big time overkill on
a smaller boat however and increase your retrieval effort since total
weight was over 60 lbs. We were pulling up most of the rode by hand
in Key West but using the windlass to break it out. It was really dug
in hard by the end of the afternoon. The alternative on a boat with
no windlass is to keep snubbing the rode and letting wave action break
it out.


That's about the system we have: 30' of 3/8 chain, which is way
oversized, hooked (now) to a steel Spade 80, which is good for a typical
34' boat. (the aluminum version works fine for us, though, and is easier
to haul.)

This is so oversized that when we raft up with boats to 50', we often
wind up depending on our anchor instead of the big boys', theirs having
crept over the weekend.

When we used a Danforth, switching from the recommended 6' of 1/4 to 15'
of 3/8 significantly improved the set in the Chesapeake mud/sand. If a
storm piped up, we had a heck of a time hauling it up, but it never
tripped out.

--
Jere Lull
Xan-a-Deux ('73 Tanzer 28 #4 out of Tolchester, MD)
Xan's NEW Pages: http://web.mac.com/jerelull/iWeb/Xan/
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