Even when your anchor is well designed and ideally matched to your boat, there are four common factors that can cause an anchor to drag: poor bottom, short scope, insufficient shock absorption, and yawing. Each of these reduces the holding capacity of the anchor, and they are additive. That is to say that any one of them can ruin your day, solving only one or two of them does not ensure good holding, and the more problems you solve, the better you’ll sleep.
Systems & Propulsion
After settling on the material, one of the most basic mainsail design questions is whether to have an attached foot or loose-foot. A sail with an attached foot, secured to the boom with a bolt rope or sail slugs, has a small advantage in area, while a loose footed sail is easier to...
Belowdecks & Amenities
The human body runs on electricity and if you overload the nervous system with an external field, everything goes haywire. Every year several people die because they go swimming near a dock, a wiring fault creates an electric field in the water, and their muscles freeze. It is...
Belowdecks & Amenities
We often get this question. “My car has air conditioning when I’m running down the street so why can’t my boat?” First, your car only has air conditioning when the engine is running, which works out fine because we only need air conditioning when the engine is...
July 25, 2019
No matter what brand of anchor shackle you decide to use, understanding sizing and grades of shackles is essential, since this connector between your rode and anchor is often the weakest link in your ground tackle. And the weakest point in the shackle is often where the shackle pin meets the body. When the shackle pin or body is loaded from an angle, the shackle body can be forced open, causing the pin to break or fall out. This is the most common failure we have seen in our tests—even when under straight-pull loads.
19%
12%
60%
9%
