Anchoring is relatively straightforward but does require communications between the person at the anchor and the person at the helm – hand signals, walkie-talkies and/or the occasional shouting match during which the husband (the captain) often blames his incompetence on the crew (his wife) – usually ending in something like: “I never wanted to go boating in the first place” – divorces proceedings to soon follow.
Divorce proceedings can be speeded up by anchoring in one of a number of small bays for which no swing room is available. To avoid swinging, the rear of the boat has to be attached to a ring embedded in the rocks high up on the shoreline. Frustration for some becomes entertainment for others and some attempts result in the couple giving up and leaving altogether. It always seems unusually quiet after that.
Logging has been prevalent in the area leaving logging cables in some of the lesser used anchorages further north to get your anchor entangled with. Some enterprising divers make an end-of-the-season trip to salvage and resell all the anchors and rode left behind. There is a little know solution to this potential problem. Most anchors have a second attachment point at the head of the anchor. If you attach a second smaller line to the head, that line can be used to pull the anchor up and away from the entangled cable or whatever. Ron and I decided to combine that idea with a crab-trap buoy which would sit about your anchor and show you and others where it was located. The line from the anchor head goes through the hole in the buoy and back down to a weight that keeps the line taut so the buoy always sits directly above the anchor head. The first execution of this approach involved a miscalculation of the line length and resulted in the buoy sitting about 2 feet below the water line. That required a complete re-anchor and the second attempt worked fine. Unfortunately this approach suffers from a level of complexity not warranted under normal anchoring conditions. When you come into an anchorage and are trying to get your anchor down in an optimum location you don’t also want to have to start calculating the crab-buoy line length, adding the extra line etc, unless you have some dedicated crew – which you never do.
WR Foster 