Any experience with the Mantus M2?

[fxykty]

I want to upgrade our current Spade S140 with a larger anchor for our Outremer 55L. I love the Spade and am very happy with its performance, but it’s a bit small for our boat and darn expensive for the S180. I also won one of the 50% off coupons from the CF Mantus Giveaway, so I’m considering the Mantus M2. We can’t fit a roll bar anchor, so the regular Mantus is out.

Does anyone have any real life experience with the M2? Looks comparable to the Spade, but is it similar in performance?

[noelex 77]

It would be great to have some user feedback, but I suspect the Mantus M2 is just too new at this stage.

The performance of M2 on the video produced by Mantus did not look fantastically impressive. On the other hand, we are always criticising anchor manufacturers for producing totally unrealistic promotional videos, so perhaps this is just a reflection of honesty.

Obviously not all boats can fit a roll bar anchor and it must be frustrating trying to sell a product that will not fit on many boats. The Mantus M1 is a brilliant anchor and this shows the design team know what they are doing, but designing a great non roll bar anchor is very much more difficult. Without a rollbar a large amount of ballast is needed to orientate the anchor in the correct setting position and this makes the fluke bulkier and smaller. Only the steel Spade has managed to overcome these inherent limitations producing a design of similar performance to roll bar models.
It has needed design elements such as a fabricated shank and lead ballast. These are expensive and create other difficulties.

Anyway, we live in interesting times for anchor development. There have been a multitude of interesting new models released such as the Mantus M2, the Rocna Vulcan, Lewmar Epsilon and the Knox. At the same time the demise of the sailing magazine budgets means we are unlikely to see the independent, detailed and statistically significant tests on anchors.

Of the above anchors, the Knox is the only model I have managed to have a good detailed look at and even this was not in the water. I cannot wait until we are cruising in warmer waters again so I can see these anchors in action, or perhaps I will fork out for an underwater drone in the meantime.

Until we at least have some user reports, personally I would buy the proven steel Spade in your position.

[Factor]

Originally Posted by noelex 77

Only the steel Spade has managed to overcome these inherent limitations producing a design of similar performance to roll bar models. .

Not so, the Sarca Excel in both independent testing and owners experience is clearly at least as good to roll bar anchors.

[fxykty]

Hmmm, hadn’t considered the Excel. I will explore the performance - Morgan’s Cloud has a good writeup of it. Any others using an Excel?

[Factor]

Look at PANOPE's videos in this forum.

[Mantus Anchors]

Hi, Greg here with Mantus. Since M2 Mantus this is a new Model without much known about its performance, I wanted to chime in here... M2 Model in our hands has uncompromising performance. It sets in some situations faster than the M1 model. The main advantage is that it is more compact and the only drawback is that in a really soft silty bottom it takes longer to right itself from an upside down position as compared to the rollbar version. We will be producing comparison videos shortly..