On Oct 27, 2:41 pm, Skip Gundlach wrote:
... I wasn't able to find any author by that name. However, I have,
now, read a 21-year-old text by that name and which had Earl
Hinz, as I offered in my reply before, as the author. ...

Earl R Hinz is one of my heroes. He is an extraordinarily talented
writer and researcher and has produced the seminal books on cruising
in Oceania based on his own trailblazing travels. You may disagree
with him, and there are a few thoughts of his that I take issue with,
but he deserves more than an ordinary amount of respect. The last
edition of _The Complete Book of Anchoring and Mooring_ came out in
2001. I have an older edition and I don't know if the new one
mentions the newer anchors but even if it doesn't the fundamentals
haven't been changed by them. I've been using a Spade for a few years
now and it is a good anchor, but it is used in the same way as the
Delta from which it was evolved. Not that anyone can learn to anchor
by reading books alone, but the Hinz book on anchoring is worth a read
and his articles and books on Pacific cruising are very good, indeed.
Of course, I think Bob is being silly, but I hope that won't put you
off Hinz.

On a more or less unrelated topic, I use my GPS for anchor watch all
the time. I've got a Furuno GP-31 and it has a simple graphic page
that displays a "bread crumb" trail. I find that I can see where I
dropped the anchor on that screen and put a goto point there. The
anchor watch alarm is then set to go off if I go outside a circle
around that point. While we sit at anchor the gps continues drawing
the track on the screen and pretty soon a thick arc is drawn. This
makes it very easy to see if we are dragging even if it is pitch black
and raining as it so often is when a front passes by in the night...

-- Tom.