If you spend any time reading the sailing community forums
you’ll quickly come to realize that there are many topics, which seem to
polarize the audience of contributors (or perhaps those sensible enough to
avoid trying to convince others just stay out of it). One of the most contentious topics is ground tackle – this
is also one of those areas where it doesn’t matter who is right – what matters
is what works for you and what you trust to protect your home.
The only question that matters is; “do you trust your ground
tackle?”
We didn’t, which was a problem.
In the period between July 2015 and January 2016 we cruised
and anchored with the ground tackle that had been in place on our boat when we
bought her. As you may have read
on the “Boat” page,
Maple is an ex-charter catamaran from the Sunsail fleet. When we bought her we were told that
she had 50 meters of chain on board which was connected to a 35kg 25kg Delta plow
anchor. We never dragged, but we
were never really trusted our ground tackle. There were a couple of things that made us feel this way.
1)
The Delta very rarely set in the first try. We would carefully drop enough anchor
and chain to reach the bottom based on our depth sounder and an eyeball
measurement of chain (it was not marked).
We would then slowly back up, laying out more chain until we thought we
had reached a 5:1 scope, at which time we would lock the chain off and reverse
on our anchor. Mostly this
resulted in the anchor dragging along the bottom so we’d bring it up and try
again. On the 3rd or 4th
try it would usually stick.
To
be fair, we were often anchoring on weedy bottoms which can be hard for any
anchor to penetrate, but we didn’t see many others struggling as much. Perhaps they were not being careful
about their anchoring, but regardless of the reason, the end result for us was
a lack of trust in our hook.
2)
The chain seemed under-sized. The boat came with 8mm G3 chain, but it
seemed rather small for the boat.
Chances are the boat left the manufacturer with an 8mm gypsy on the
windlass which is what determined the chain size. If this was the case, I didn’t have any real reason to
believe that it wasn’t big enough but it felt smaller than it should be.
3)
In Italy I had a chance to measure the chain and
attempt to mark it – in doing this I made the discovery that we did not have
50M of chain, we had a mere 40M, including the length that extended into the
chain locker where it attached to the boat. Assuming we continued to put out 5:1 scope we would be
limited to anchoring in 8M or less and there aren’t many anchorages with that
kind of depth in Greece or Turkey.
The end result is our ground tackle would have us putting out less than
ideal scope making us less secure than we’d like. This is probably the best (and main reason) we didn’t really
trust our ground tackle.
4)
The ground tackle was not really set up
properly.
The bitter end of the chain was shackled to the boat and the shackle was
undersized and rusted shu t. Not
only would it not hold if a load was placed on it, we would struggle to cut it
free if we had to leave an anchorage in a hurry.
The
shackle holding the anchor to the chain was undersized and rusted. This was the weakest link in our ground
tackle and meant that the working strength of the entire system was even less
than the strength of the 8mm chain that I already felt was under sized.
No – it was a given that we would be getting new ground
tackle. Anchors and chain are an
expensive proposition, but well worth the expense given the importance of being
trusting your vessel to stay put when it is most vulnerable.
