When anchoring and mooring, it clearly critical that you can trust the breaking strength of the lines and hardware and also to protect them from chafe and damage from mooring rings, covered in rust or barnacles. Lines can chafe through and break if the wave action is large and continuous enough and can have disastrous results by suddenly set your boat free to float, perhaps in the middle of the night. Chafe can wear through lines in a matter of minutes or hours, if severe enough conditions persist.
Anchoring securely means peace of mind; a worry-free night's sleep and the avoidance of nightmare scenarios. For these good reasons, we wanted Chloe to have the best anchoring system for a 49-ft monohull in her class. We want to be able to anchor, tie-up or moor up to a buoy in any heavy weather condition and have a good sense of security.
We read and researched all that we could to draw to come up with the following conclusions.
We started with the following requirement specifications:
Solidity & Dependability. Nothing is going to break due to undersized lines of fittings. Nothing is going to rust out. The anchor is going to bed down hard into the sea bed and it not going to be jerked out by a tugging bow. Even in heavy weather, shock loads will be accommodated by the system. Chafe will be not cause ropes to fail. The system will require a reasonable level of maintenance and inspection. Simple to deploy. Simple to haul in. Not overly voluminous to store. UV resilient. Redundant components. System should work with anchors, dock moorings and buoys.
Our conclusions:
Anchor
We wanted an oversized, best in class anchor as Chloe's primary anchor. Mounted on one of two heavy duty bow rollers and simple to deploy, we selected a 33Kg Rocna anchor in galvanized steel. We liked the design of this anchor's roll over bar and the reviews of the Rocna, in terms of being able set in a wide variety of bottom conditions. We would install a trip line for those rare occasions of getting fouled and wrap the roll bar in parachute chord to stop any bow clunking while stowed.
Rode
Our rode is 100 meters of 10-mm high tensile, galvanized steel chain. No nylon so as to avoid chafe. This high quality chain has a breaking strain of 7200-Kg and a working load of 1800-Kg. It weighs 2.3-Kg per meter of length so as to add an additional weigh of 230-Kg to the 66-Kg anchor, resulting in nearly 300-Kg of total anchor system. We'd use high quality galvanized or Stainless steel shackles at each point.
Windlass
Chloe's windlass is a 1.5-HP vertically mounted windlass, protected in a locker and accessible under a hatch at the foot of the mast. Chain is pulled from the bow and through a hawser before being directed down to the anchor locker.
Anchor Chain Locker
Chloe's anchor locker is located at the foot of the mast. The 230-Kg of anchor chain weight is therefore located in the center of the boat. Most Small and mid-sized sailing yachts locate their anchor lockers instead, in a forward bow locker. The location of this considerable dead weight serves to drive the boats bow down into waves, rather than allowing the bow to ride up and over. The location of Chloe's central weighted locker means that the anchor chain is run though a lateral hawser pipe to keep the forward decks clear. This is perhaps an ideal arrangement for a sailing boat in heavy seas. In turn the anchor locker is accessible from below, via a master closet hatch. The locker is fabricated in heavy guage aluminum and includes a drainage pump system.
Anchor Swivel
We will install a high quality anchor swivel between the 10-mm chain and the anchor. This will assist in both reliability and setting speed so as to provide a little more advantage in setting well in the case of more problematic bottom types.
Snubber Critically the anchor snubber is perhaps even more important that the anchor chain - as it is the snubber that will absorb the shock loads imposed by waves and gusts. We designed the snubber to be used for three situations.
1. Anchoring in heavy weather
2. Tying up to a buoy with rusty rings
3. Tying up to a dock with rusty rings
The anchor snubber is in total 21-m long to provide for lots of stretch. It's comprised of 10-m of polyester 18-mm Octoplait, spliced onto 2-m of 10-mm chain, spliced in turn onto 10-m of 18-mm Octoplait. Polyester Octoplait is used, instead of nylon for it's extra handling performance and feel; the extra length plus the fact that it is Octoplait, providing for stretch. This central chain section is designed to remove the problem of chafe for when used as a strop while tied up to a rusty mooring buoy or dock wall ring.
Optionally, when used as an anchor snubber the mid section of chain is connected with a simple shackled chain gripper to a heavy duty Mantis end chain hook. This dual chain gripper-hook arrangement provides for a way to connect the snubber securely to the anchor chain; 10-m in front of the bow.
By shackling a chain gripper to the mid section of the central chain, we have introduced redundancy for if one side of the snubber were to chafe & fail.
The snubber has leather chafe protected 12" loops at each cleated end.
The following two images show the same snubber, deployed as either a mooring strop or as an anchor snubber. By using the same Octoplait--> Chain --> Octoplait line for both applications; storage space is saved.
Perhaps the key element of this versatile setup is the use of the Kong Chain Gripper, in conjunction with a high quality Mantus Chain Hook. This, somewhat unique pair of components connects a chain to a chain. It's comprised of a shackled connection to the snubber's chain and in turn a chain hook to the anchor's chain.
This allows for a quick change over from mooring buoy strop to anchor snubber configurations.
You can pick these Mantus Anchor hooks up from Amazon for 1/4" chains and also for heavier 1/2" chain sizes.
These two chain attaching components are shackled together permanently and secured with Monel seizing wire. These then provide a way to connect the strop's center section of chain to the anchor chain.
The Mantus anchor hook is very quick to attach to the anchor chain where-as the Kong Chain Grabber requires a simple shackle key to attach reliably to the strop's chain.
We'll test this system, out and report back as to how well it works.
