Tom DöhlerOne of the peculiarities of living on a floating home is that sometimes you really want your house (read: boat) to stay exactly where it is. This is especially true when you have made it into a nice anchorage after a long passage and want to settle for the night.
Anchoring is a topic that kicks up a bit of a fuzz within the sailing community. It’s one of those things where every sailor has their own opinions about which type of anchor is best, how much chain to put out or not, and what the best way is to dig in and retrieve your ground tackle.
Which anchor should it be?
We’ve been reading and researching for months about which type of anchor to get. After consulting Poiraud’s “Complete Anchoring Handbook” and a multitude of websites we’ve settled on using our existing Danforth style anchor as a secondary anchor and either go with a Rocna or a Spade. Both are excellent anchors with superb holding power-to-weight ratios, they behave well on most sea beds and have good resetting abilities. After much deliberation we bought a Spade anchor, it’s also the anchor of choice of John and Phyllis from Morgan’s Cloud; a couple whose opinion and experience we highly respect!
Where do we get it?
We ordered the anchor from Sea Tech & Fun Europe in France. Slightly odd name, but the people there were amazing. They responded to my initial email within an hour, and shipped the anchor to Barcelona within just a few days. We ordered the anchor one size bigger than the recommendation from the manufacturer, which meant a package with a 20KG anchor was waiting for me in the office ready to be brought to the marina in Badalona.
Since we don’t own a car I first thought I might just walk the 5 km to the marina. It turns out however that a 20KG anchor with most of it’s weight in the tip is hard to carry! So I decided to call a cab instead. The first cab I ordered using the myTaxi app (which is a bit like Uber) cancelled on me straight away. The second cab showed up as promised, with a very grumpy cabbie who was not too happy that I had to bring an anchor and a 2 meter mattress as cargo – rather than the 6 people he’d expected from my ordering a large car. I told you about the new mattress that we had made, didn’t I?
Anyway, after some arguing backwards and forwards, some large scale origami to squeeze in the mattress, and the promise of a hefty tip we were on our way to the marina. Carrying the anchor and the mattress to the marina was painful, but I’ll spare you the boring, sweaty details.
Installing and mounting the Spade
Putting the anchor together and mounting it on the bow roller turned out to be easier than I thought. The Spade is just mounted to the shaft with a single screw. The fact that the shaft is bent downwards works really well with our anchor locker, better than the old Danforth style anchor in fact.
Now the new spade sits on the bow roller and waits patiently for it’s first use. If this monster doesn’t prevent the boat dragging then I don’t know what will!
