In the summer of 2014, Fortress Anchors, the maker of a popular aluminum Danforth-style anchor, conducted a series of anchor-holding tests in Chesapeake Bay, an area renowned for its soft mud and oyster-shell seabed. Its aim was to examine the performance of its products against some of the newer anchor designs introduced since the companys previous head-to-head tests (see “Anchoring in Squishy Bottoms,” PS February 2015.

Practical Sailor carried out its own series of anchor tests in a mud bottom in 2006 (see April 2006 and October 2006 issues), and those tests bore out a commonly known fact: Danforth-style anchors, which feature flukes that are proportionally larger than other types of anchors of the same mass, tend to hold better than older, plough-style anchors in soft mud.

These tests and others are curated in Volume 1, “Anchoring in Sand and Mud,” the first part of of our four volume series on anchoring at www.practical-sailor.com/products.