2nd anchor

Any clever ideas on how to deploy and retrieve?

Hi,

We nave a 30kg danforth anchor attached to 20m of leadrope and 70 meters of normal 20mm mooring rope all in the boat garage.
We also have a removable "bow roller" which we attach to the garage door and a electric winch inside the garage.
Theoretically we deploy the second anchor first:
A) we hang the anchor from the roller and get ready to deploy it.
B) we drive the stern of the boat over the spot where we want to set the second anchor and we release it ( remember we only use rope, no chain) driving forward and releasing the anchor from the stern.
C) we deploy about 30-40 meters of the anchor leadrope and bring the anchor rope to the bow section.
D) we drive the bow of the boat over the spot where we want the main anchor to be while releasing the secondary anchors rope so that we do not disturb the secondary anchor which is already set in the sea ottom.
E) we anchor the main anchor normaly while we also take care of the secondary anchor rope releasing rope as nessesary.

To retrieve the anchors:
We retrieve the primary anchor first.
Then we bring the secondary anchor rope back to the stern.
We use the "bow roller" attached to the garage door and the electric winch to retrieve the secondary anchor - the boat goes inverse to the anchor. This is easier since the skipper has direct view over the procedure.
Retrieving an anchor attached to a rope from the stern is dangerous since you can run over the anchor and catch the rope around the propeller, so great care is needed.

I say theoretically because we never used the second anchor until now, but I have used the above technique many times with my previous boat and I had experience how to prepare the hardware. The reason that we never used the second anchor with the 630 is that our main anchor sets so good that we never felt any reason to use both anchors.


Edited by panos - 21 April 2013 at 21:21