Stern Anchor?

[Montanan]

A primary purpose for deploying stern anchor is pictured below. Very common in Scandinavia. The short fetch of the anchorages keeps waves to a minimum or non-existent so stern towards water has no wave taking issues and of course bow to land provides for keeping the rudder and propeller standing off the shallows and the bow / pulpit provides easy land access with a ladder or a ramp.

[TrentePieds]

Bugzy:

As another Vancouverite - sort of - lemme see if I can help you out here :-)

I had a look at your previous posts and they lead me to believe that you are quite new to seafaring, and that you may have picked up a McGregor from down the street for not a lot of money. Ergo - best if we go back to basics :-)

How you anchor, and what sort of anchor you use, depends on FOUR things (there is no "one answer fits all!): 1) What sort of skipper (how experienced) you are. 2) What sort of boat you are in. 3) What sort of water you are on and 4) what sort of bottom is below you.

So in your case it seems that we are talking about an inexperienced skipper anchoring a 1 ton boat somewhere in the Salish Sea under benign conditions in one of the few protected anchorages we have where the bottom is sand and mud.

Proceeding from that assumption consider this: A one ton boat under those conditions will almost always be on a "lunch hook" - a light anchor on a short scope. Rarely if ever will you need to anchor overnight in snarly conditions on a lee shore, and never, if you know what's good for you, will you go near a lee shore in a McG26 in any kind of a blow. Therefore to carry more than a 22lb Bruce or Danforth (or corresponding Fortress) with, say, 40 feet of 5/16" chain spliced to a 200 foot nylon rode forward is overkill and would affect the boat's handling. There is no NEED for a stern anchor under these assumptions.

BUT, in the summer, which is, I dare say, the only time you'd have a McG26 out of English Bay, the few anchorages we have, such as Pirates Cove on DeCourcey Island, are jam-packed, and you cannot afford to swing out of phase with other boats already there. That is where the stern anchor comes in. You can set it in the regular fashion if you are further from the beach than the length of your stern rode. If your stern rode will reach the beach, you take the anchor ashore and bury it on the beach. From a McG26 with the board up, you can WADE ashore with your stern anchor in places like Pirate's. In some anchorages our benevolent government has set rings into the rocks that you can tie off to. Pirate's is one of them.

A totally different scenario is Codfish Cove on Jededia Island. Until you are at the very inner end of the cove, you have 200 feet of water under you even 40 feet from the rock face. Your bower rode ("bower" = at the bow) won't reach bottom with any kinda scope at all. So you gotta go right up to the inner end of the cove to get water shallow enuff for your bower to set. Under no circumstances will you have room to swing. You GOTTA take a line ashore and either bury your stern anchor or tie off to something solid like a tree. The cove is VERY narrow with steep rocks rising high on both sides. The cove opens to the sou'east, and given its topography you are sheltered from winds except the sou'easterlies. But winds in the Straits of Georgia are predominantly from either the nor'west or the sou'east, so Codfish can be problematic. In any event, since we have semidiurnal tides, the flow of water is into the cove for six hours or so, then out of the cove for six hours or so, with a rise and fall at springs of maybe 12 or 14 feet. Therefore even a McG26, with has more hull above the water than below, will always be tide-rode, i.e. you will crash into either the rockwall or another boat UNLESS you are anchored both fore and aft!

I'll stop here, but you get the drift! I see responses from people who sail the Caribbean and people who sail 20 ton boats. What was said in those responses is apposite, even unassailable, for those men in those boats in those locales, but it has little immediate relevance for a beginner in a McG26 in the Salish Sea.

Now, if you would like, we can discuss anchoring in more general terms, but before we do do that, get all the responses in this thread under your belt. You might like to know that TrentePieds is a 5-ton fin-keeler and that for various reasons I most often anchor over the stern. These are things we can discuss after you get this thread under your belt. My ground tackle is a 33lb Bruce bower with 40 feet of chain and 200 feet of nylon. My "kedge" (stern) anchor is a 7lb Fortress, no chain, 300 feet of nylon. This anchor stows in a tube on the taffrail, but I never use it except to take ashore.

You might also like to know that your boat, like mine, will lie more quietly when anchored over the stern. But there are caveats about that that we can discuss anon.

All the best

TrentePieds

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Montanan

A primary purpose for deploying stern anchor is pictured below. Very common in Scandinavia. The short fetch of the anchorages keeps waves to a minimum or non-existent so stern towards water has no wave taking issues and of course bow to land provides for keeping the rudder and propeller standing off the shallows and the bow / pulpit provides easy land access with a ladder or a ramp.

Indeed.


When doing that, we typically throw the Fortress off the stern as we come in, still making a knot or two, with the rode let through a stern cleat to an electric sheet winch.


It has never once failed to bite HARD, after which we regulate distance from the shore by playing the anchor line on the winch, while someone gets a shore line on.



We have the expensive but incredibly handy Batsystem bow pulpit ladder sold in Swedish chandleries, to step onto the rocks, like this: https://www.batsystem.se/en/products/st130/

[thinwater]

I don't understand why going to the bow is a problem. You will nearly ALWAYS need to bleed speed, and the best way is a 180 turn. I've had 3 engine failures (one because I was an idiot, the other two because I picked up floating trash leaving a marina). In both cases I had some momentum, so rather than futz around, I used it to point a better direction and get away from the hazard. By the time you get to the bow, the boat will be nearly stopped and should be where you want it. Lower the hook, pay out scope, and set. I've done this in marina fairways and between breakwaters. No problem. But you have to work deliberately and directly.

The bow anchor should be ready to go in seconds when in harbor areas. I have always been able to get it to the bottom before I started drifting back.

Walking to the bow is nothing in calm settings, which is almost certainly where this will happen. If it isn't easy, fix what ever makes it difficult. If I felt walking to the bow was difficult, I would have a different boat. And I've had larger boats.

[Montanan]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

Indeed.


When doing that, we typically throw the Fortress off the stern as we come in, still making a knot or two, with the rode let through a stern cleat to an electric sheet winch.


It has never once failed to bite HARD, after which we regulate distance from the shore by playing the anchor line on the winch, while someone gets a shore line on.



We have the expensive but incredibly handy Batsystem bow pulpit ladder sold in Swedish chandleries, to step onto the rocks, like this: https://www.batsystem.se/en/products/st130/

Really like the bow pulpit ladder systems for ease of deploying to shore.

Very much wish we had one my smaller lake boat used in the summer months in Montana on our alpine lakes. Our bow pulpit does not have any convenient method to deploy from. Fortunately our MacGregor has only 21 inches of draft with the swing keel up and the rudder swings horizontally to be able to come almost complete out of the water so we utilize the vertically folding ladder mounted on the stern and just deploy an anchor off the bow and then motor backwards to the beach and tie off to a sturdy point on the land, typically a tree, sometimes a kedging anchor. But because of the rudder being in the way one can't bring the stern all the way up to and onto the shore so one has to step off the ladder and wade in the shallow water a few feet to the shore, e.g. in knee depth water. Sometimes we just run the bow hard up onto a beach and then climb over the bow pulpit and jump ashore but it is quite awkward to climb back aboard by pulling oneself up and over a standard bow pulpit. The only troubles we have with stern towards the shore deployment onto the beach is when a power boat comes by with a large wake and causes our boat to bounce the stern onto the beach or rocks near the beach. I have found that if I attach a float to the bottom rung of the folding ladder deployed off the stern that it keeps the ladder from being deployed completely vertical which could cause it to break its mounts on the stern or to crush the ladder if my boat rocks and the ladder hits hard on the bottom of the shallow very near the beach. A piece of float noddle taped to the lowest rung keeps the ladder laying safely horizontally until one puts some modest weight on it so as to then have the ladder deploy vertically several feet into the water.

[Zzmeyer]

The OP was talking about a bow anchor that is launched from the stern, I think. I was in Isla San Francisco in the Sea of Cortez when a Cal 29 pulled into the anchorage. The single hander launched his anchor from the stern as soon as he had lost headway. He immediately jumped overboard and speared a fish and was back in the cockpit before the anchor had set. Pretty impressive. I have no idea how he let out scope doing it that way, but boy was he cool.