With my boating plans for the summer including the Severn and the tidal Trent I have been looking into getting a few items that I hope I'll never need. I've got the lifejacket, even if the courier firm did deliver it to a house eight doors away on the other side of the road without leaving a note and in the depths of the storage locker in the engine room on Starcross I've found a Danforth anchor. Obviously the anchor's not much good on its own and I'll need some chain and rope, although I've no idea how much, and I'm still a bit puzzled about how and where to attach it to the boat.
The obvious place is either the "T-stud" at the bow or one of the stern dollies but from what I've read on-line this may not be such a good idea as these might not be able to take the strain of the anchor being deployed and I might end up losing both them and the anchor.
What does everybody else do?
3 comments:
Fortunately for us Colecraft weld an Anchor attachment lug on the front of the welldeck.
I have heard, that Anchors dropped in certain areas of the Severn go so far into the mud they are impossible to pull back up and you end up cutting the rope!!
But remember Jim the captain always goes down with his ship (unless he's Italian)
Ray,
Waste of time buying the lifejacket then!
The theory is that the anchor should attach to the front of the boat going upstream and the back going downstream, but, if the river is wide enough for the boat to swing round, then the front is the better bet so that you end up facing into the current. The T-stud is the obvious point. The force on it should not be too great provided you have sufficiently elastic rope. Jim says you should have rope and chain combined three times as long as the maximum depth of the water and that a third of this should be chain and two thirds polypropylene rope. Even if attached at the front it needs to be somewhere you can get to it quickly.
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