Its not theanchor...................... its the bottom! Dont put the
cart in ront of the horse. Listen to the bottom and it will tell you
what type ofanchorto use.

This old lore of choosing the anchor by the bottom type is very out
dated. Anchors should work in all bottoms, within reason, and if they
don't there's something wrong with them. (Exceptions naturally are
solid rock or coral, or the same with an impossibly thin layer of sand/
mud over the top. There you're just depending on dead weight - if you
need to anchor securely, go somewhere else.)

MBM, in their own write-up of the YM testing linked to above, wrote in
their conclusion:

"The new generation of roll-bar type anchors were a revelation. You
don't see many of these stowed on bow-rollers in the UK, but they were
truly impressive performers - especially the New Zealand-made Rocna...
They showed extreme holding power and versatility, giving the
established Spade and Fortress a run for their money. The anchors that
performed best in our tests were the ones that self orientated
themselves on the seabed with an optimum penetrating angle. So are new
designs the way to go? It seems we are getting closer to an anchor
that will cope with all types of seabeds, a universal all-rounder. So
the days of the long-distance boater who carries two or three
different anchors to cope with a variety of conditions may well soon
be numbered."

This is very perceptive, although the testers did not test in a huge
variety of seabeds (only three) so they don't know how right they are!

The Rocna, and to some degree the Spade, are superb general purpose
anchors, equally as good as any "specialist" anchor in any seabed and
superior in most. It is not necessary to carry two or three specialist
types, each only good for one type of bottom, maybe to never be used.
This approach stems simply from the fundamental flaws of the old
types, with each anchor in such a collection only present in order to
address the flaws of the others.

In the data from SAIL, the "max before releasing" figures of the Rocna
are almost unbelievably higher than the remainder of the field. The
Spade, to its credit, is second. Refer:
http://www.rocna.com/distributable/r...nd-testing.pdf

The reason for this is NOT that the competing anchors ALWAYS perform
that much worse than the Rocna. Rather, it is a function of
consistency. The data is the average of all pull tests, and while some
of the others may have performed quite well, recording competitive
"peaks", they were not reliable enough to perform to the same high
average on all occasions. When you're anchoring in different sea-bed
types, and you don't always know the bottom, and you just need the
anchor to set dependably - then this consistency of performance is the
most critical characteristic.