"Jessica B" wrote in message
...

I guess I'm still stuck on the anchor question... for people who
aren't really strong in the upper body... I can see why you might not
want to rely on an electrically driven winch to raise the anchor,
because if you did and ran out of battery, you'd be stuck. So... what
about a manually operated winch? I was at the Home Depot and saw a
hand crank winch. Wouldn't that work?

I missed the earlier part of this thread, so I don't know how big a boat
you're talking about but I'm going to assume, since we're here in
rec.boats.cruising, that you're talking about a cruising boat rather than a
day-boat of some kind ...

A long time ago I had a little twenty-eight-foot cruiser, and my anchor gear
was half-inch rope and a thirteen-pound Danforth anchor, with maybe six feet
of chain between the end of the rope and the anchor for chafe protection,
and I just hauled it up hand-over-hand in mild conditions, or sometimes in
heavier conditions put it over my shoulder and walked back down the side
deck to haul it aboard. Worked like a charm, and the weight and complication
of a windlass would have been wasted on that pretty little thing.

If yours is a boat in that size range, you probably don't need the weight or
the complication. If you have a winch on the mast to hoist a sail with, you
can wrap the rope around that and crank it in with the winch handle or lead
it back to the cockpit and do the same with what will probably be a more
powerful winch.

For a bigger boat, things may get more complicated, although even there the
cockpit winches, possibly being geared, might serve you well. So, anyway,
assuming you've got a bigger boat...

There are good-quality manually-operated windlasses that are designed for
the marine environment. They work fine, but they might be a bit slow in
operation. At least they won't run out of electricity.

For electric windlasses - and for manually-operated winches too - the kind
of thing you find at Home Depot or Harbor Freight has no place on a boat.
They won't hold up in that environment - rust, corrosion between dissimilar
types of metals, etc. Don't even consider them, unless the boat is used only
in fresh water and is carefully maintained. In that environment you might
get away with it, especially on a rather small boat.

So, Jessica, if your boat's already got an electric windlass, use it and be
glad you've got it. Plan carefully around your electrical consumption and
maintain it meticulously.

If it doesn't have one, and you want to save yourself some work, and it's a
fairly good-sized boat of more than thirty feet, put a good-quality electric
windlass on it and enjoy it. Or, if you use all-chain, at least a
good-quality manual windlass, although you'll work a little harder at it. In
either case, you might end up in some rough conditions and really appreciate
what it can do for you in getting the hook up. Inshallah, it might make the
difference between getting away from a lee shore or going on the beach.

If, through bad planning or bad luck, you end up without enough power to run
an electric windlass, there are other ways to get it up; for instance:

Once, on a forty-one foot sloop of some twenty-six thousand pounds
displacement that I owned (and still own, in fact) after my pretty little
twenty-eight-footer, my girlfriend and I used to get the hook up in fairly
mild conditions, without using much upper-body strength, this way: up at the
bow I put the rope over my shoulder and just walked back to the cockpit
along the side deck. When I got there, my girlfriend wrapped the rope around
a cockpit winch to hold what we'd gained and I headed back up to the bow to
pick it up again and bring back another thirty feet of rope. Bye and bye, we
broke the anchor out of the bottom and I hauled the last of it up hand over
hand.

Now this worked fine with 5/8" rope with about twenty-five feet of 3/8"
chain and a thirty-five pound CQR anchor, but I would work up a bit of sweat
getting the last of it up. After all, I was probably dead-lifting about
sixty or seventy pounds of steel. But I was young and tough back in those
days. Even then, if it had been all chain, it would have been very heavy
work indeed, probably heavier than I could manage.

We actually had a manually-operated windlass, but in mild conditions it was
just faster to walk it back as I described than to turn the handles on the
windlass and slowly crank the line in. If it had been my girlfriend doing it
by herself, with her lesser body strength, she would have just cranked it in
with the windlass. And if it had been all-chain, so would I.

And that's a factor: if you're using an all-chain rode, you just about have
to have a windlass. It can be manually operated, or it can be electric,
preferably with a feature that allows you to operate it manually with a
lever or something when you're out of power (and it'll happen eventually).
However, the manual option will probably be rather slow and will likely be
hard work.

So there you have it. No magic bullets, but some things that have worked for
me, and worked well.

Best regards,
Tom