Who Needs a Snubber, Anyway?

[UNCIVILIZED]

Originally Posted by seahag

Thanks- good information! currently it's 5/8" with the 5/16 chain, seems like splicing the additional line is the best approach and we can save the snubber for shallower anchoring. Yeah I guess it's about time to get that book, been hearing about it for years.

If you're going to give the Irony Splice a try, plan on doing several practice ones, as it's more involved than doing your usual 3-strand splices. And one of the barriers to doing it well is that the fibers in each lay of the rope's 3 strands want to seperate from one another. Or to put it another way, "friz out" a bit, while you're trying to splice them.

So one trick to use is to pick up some hair gel, & soak/coat each of the rope's 3 strands in it, so that the fibers all stick together when doing the splice. Then once you're done splicing, you can just rinse the stuff out of the rope.

Otherwise, even when you're proficient at doing this splice, the individual fibers trying to "escape" gets to be a pain in the rear. So agents like hair gel make life (& splcing) easier.

[Charlie]

on my 10 meter boat I was anchored in 15' of water. The wind was blowing at a bout 50 knots sustained with stronger gusts. The waves were steep and of a short duration. Of the boat that were anchored some had all chain and some had snubbers. I had 5/8" three strand with 4 meters of chain. At some point all of us had our anchor rodes stretched taught. I sat on the bow watching mine for chafe when I saw the wind shift and align itself with the short steep seas. I noticed that a steel boat with all chain set at shallow angle ( I don't know how much chain he had out) would take quite a shock load. It is my belief that the shock load was both on the boat - which was visible - and the anchor. After about 20 minutes of this the anchor pulled out. The anchor had been well set because it had held for 2 hours. It is my opinion that the shock load ripped the anchor out of the ground. Of the boats that end up holding in those conditions 4 of 12 two of us had mostly rope rhodes. The boat and the cantenary effect stretched probably 30' to 40'. I think that this kept my anchor in the ground. Ken's system which I have seen is great. I use 15' of 5/8" three strand on my 21k lb 41' boat. I keep wanting to increase the length to 30' but have not gotten around to it. I believe in the shock absorber effect as being beneficial.