Add a Windlass to a 30 foot sailboat

[sv_pelagia]

Originally Posted by westwon

Also, is there a way to reply so that it appears directly under the person I'm replying to? Or do all replies simply go to the bottom of the thread?


Steve

Use "quote"...

[westwon]

Thank you TrentePieds. Some excellent advice there! I have also used the straight up/down method to ease the process of retrieval, especially when it's not too windy. My old Newport is pretty decent at anchor, although as you said, light, which does cause some hunting about. My big concern as I range further by myself is that I want to ease the process of emergency retrieval during a re-anchoring event. Reading your post, perhaps I'm being overly concerned.
Thanks again!
Steve

[westwon]

Originally Posted by Cthoops

You’re very welcome. I looked through my Kindle app and it’s in the May/June 2021 magazine.

Going to look for that right now

[zstine]

I see you have rope rode now... I have a 41 foot boat and added 125ft of chain and windlass. My bow sat almost 3 inches lower!!


If you switch to all chain and add a windlass and battery up forward you will find the boat floats significantly bow down and sailing performance noticeably different.



Consider that you may need to either have the rigging adjusted to put rake back in the mast which you just removed, or add a few hundred pounds in the stern, which is what I did in way of solar arch, 530W of solar panels and an added 25gal. aux fuel tank.

[jen1722terry]

We have a Lofrans Royal manual windlass on our 31' sailboat. We rarely need to use it. It's there for the rare times we need to anchor in deep water. 90' of 5/16 chain and a 25# anchor is too much for us to muscle on board.

It takes little effort to crank, though it does require a tailer to feed the chain into the hawse pipe. Not the ideal set up, but we could not position the windlass directly over the hawse pipe.

Drilling the deck and installing the backing plate was simple. We drilled near the bow cleats so the deck there was not cored. We used acorn nuts with rubbber caps below to avoid whacking our heads on them (we sleep in the v-berth).

As our boat is a cutter with a boom-footed staysail, the windlass is out of the way under that small boom and not really a problem when using the foredeck.

You had mentioned switching to all chain. We considered this, but have since learned that we very rarely need to let out 200 feet of rode. In fact, our chain is spliced into 150' of 3-strand nylon - ideal snubbing material. So, unless we're in very shallow water or have limited swing room, we let out all the chain plus 20 or more feet of the nylon. Makes the system self-snubbing and eliminates the need for snubbers and a chain hook in heavy weather.

Cheers

[Quadrille in JB]

Your set up is a lot like my Oday 34. The anchor locker is so shallow the chain would pile up quickly and I didn’t want to intrude into the v-berth below. To simplify matters I used a Loftans manual windlass. There was no wiring to worry about or any protrusions into the v-berth. I’ll crank the windlass about five times and then throw the chain into the locker. It works well for me in the lofrans windlass has lots of power.

[jen1722terry]

Yes, Qualdrille, we do have a somewhat similar set up to your foredeck.

Our windlass can be operator without a tailer if we do it like you do: 5 cranks, feed the chain in the hawse pipe, repeat.

The little windlass is plenty powerful. Low mainentance. No wiring. Easy to install.

Cheers

[westwon]

Originally Posted by zstine

I see you have rope rode now... I have a 41 foot boat and added 125ft of chain and windlass. My bow sat almost 3 inches lower!!


If you switch to all chain and add a windlass and battery up forward you will find the boat floats significantly bow down and sailing performance noticeably different.



Consider that you may need to either have the rigging adjusted to put rake back in the mast which you just removed, or add a few hundred pounds in the stern, which is what I did in way of solar arch, 530W of solar panels and an added 25gal. aux fuel tank.

Excellent advice Zstine, thank you! Newport built a huge anchor locker. If i filled it with chain rode, the stern would be out of the water


Steve

[TrentePieds]

Westwon said: "My big concern as I range further by myself is that I want to ease the process of*emergency*retrieval during a re-anchoring event."

If I may offer a further comment:

In a Newport 30 you are not likely to be going much beyond Jordan River in the Straits of Juan deFuca or Port Hardy at the top of the Island, although you obviously could if you insist :-)

My own experience as a single-handing Sunday sailor is that anchoring never gets problematic where I sail unless, in places such as the approaches to Nanaimo, you happen to snag some abandoned sunken gear. If that happens, your capstan/windlass will probably not be man enough to haul it up, so you wind up calling on Mr. Armstrong anyway. There are lots of techniques for dealing with such a mishap, but using the capstan isn't one of them. We can talk more about that if you like.

For now, I thot I'd tell you that there is wisdom in having a “scotsman” aboard so that if things get dicey in your anchorage, you can skive off to sea where it is safe after having marked and slipped your rode. Then, when things settle down, you can come back, find your scotsman, and retrieve your expensive ground tackle.

Obviously you cannot carry a scotsman of the size the fishermen use around here, but that isn't necessary. A big fender will do, because all it has to carry is the weight of 30 feet or so of 3/8" 3 strand nylon, and that ain't much. The rest of the rode will be lying on the bottom.

One of the anchorages you might like to make note of is Codfish Cove on the east side of Lasqueti Island. Long and narrow and well protected. Convention there is to take a line ashore at the very top end of the cove because there really isn't room for the boat to swing on the tide changes. In Pirates' Cove on DeCoursey Island there are rings set into the cliff wall on the eastern side so boats can belay their stern lines there. It is for eventualities like that that you see so many cruisers with a reel of webbing mounted on the “pushpit”. I don't have one, but I consider it a wonderful piece of gear to have. 300 feet of webbing on a reel is luvverly, but you can, as I do, get away with 300 feet of 3 strand stowed in a bucket in a cockpit locker.

In my early sailing days coming to anchor, and weighing, under sail was normal practice. But there were fewer boats then, and consequently more room in anchorages. I think that these days doing so amounts to no more than showmanship. A reliable engine is the way to go. And if you ever DO have to abandon an anchorage under stress of weather, there really isn't any other satisfactory way to go.

Cheers

TP

[Cheechako]

Originally Posted by jen1722terry

Yes, Qualdrille, we do have a somewhat similar set up to your foredeck.

Our windlass can be operator without a tailer if we do it like you do: 5 cranks, feed the chain in the hawse pipe, repeat.

The little windlass is plenty powerful. Low mainentance. No wiring. Easy to install.

Cheers

On my 30 footer, in mostly calm weather, with a manual windlass, I found it easier to haul chain in by hand using gloves. After that just use the windlass for last feet when the heavy anchor was hanging.

[Cheechako]

Originally Posted by westwon

Hi Bill.


I have 40 feet of chain at present, and am considering going to an all-chain setup. I do have a bow roller, though it really needs an upgrade. Thank you for reminding me of that!
I really want to go with an electric as I'm getting on a bit, and everything hurts a bit more now! Primarily though, its about being able to safely re-anchor in the middle of the night while solo sailing.
Thanks
Steve

An electric is nice for sure. Especially if short handed. And in chop too.
You can move the boat forward and retrieve a lot of chain while it's not under strain.

In electrics I heavily favor a vertical windlass. They feed reliably and with little jamming etc. I did not have that experience with horizontals. Poor stripping, jams etc. A vertical can feed into a large PVC tube or etc and get the chain low in the bow.

If you DO go manual, get the fastest retrieval ratio possible. It seems like some of them you crank get a few inches at a time. A REAL PITA! It takes forever to retrieve. (Which is why I mentioned hand retrieval earlier )

One way:

[Stu Jackson]

Originally Posted by jen1722terry

...........................


You had mentioned switching to all chain. We considered this, but have since learned that we very rarely need to let out 200 feet of rode. In fact, our chain is spliced into 150' of 3-strand nylon - ideal snubbing material. So, unless we're in very shallow water or have limited swing room, we let out all the chain plus 20 or more feet of the nylon. Makes the system self-snubbing and eliminates the need for snubbers and a chain hook in heavy weather.

Cheers

Great idea that I been promoting for many years, here and on other boating forums, from my friend Steve:


Steve’s Anchoring 101

The Rocna. All 20kg of it with 100ft of chain. The rest of the world can debate all they like. When I pull into a place like Bodega Bay at midnight and the fog is so thick I can't see the jetty 50 feet away to make an entrance, I drop my hook in the rolling ocean swells with the surf crashing (Foster says it's like staying in a cheap Best Western beside the highway), and I sleep. And in the morning I have a windlass to pull the beast up and I wouldn't trade it for anything. (I also wouldn't add more chain - this works perfectly in 25 to 30 feet of water - you let all the chain out and you tie off nylon at the preferred scope and don't bother with separate snubbers and chain hooks and all that stuff...)

[Cheechako]

The advantage of all chain is not just protection of the rode from the bottom. It's retrieval. Push a button, it comes in and self stows.
Trying to hand pull the rope rode, and pushing the wet noodle into the hawse, or using a capstan and scarring it up when the chain comes in, or getting the chain back in the wildcat, risking fingers etc makes life not so simple. Especially when there is chop.

[TrentePieds]

Cheechako said: " get the fastest retrieval ratio possible".

Goes without saying - but:

Coming to my anchorage I haul 15 fathoms outa the locker and leave it on deck. Because a fathom is the distance between my hands when I stretch my arms out [which is what the word means :-)], that takes about 20 seconds. No small boat windlass/capstan I know of can equal that. 15 fathoms give me a scope of 7 after a 16 foot rise of tide when I've 6 feet under my keel at low tide.

I pay out hand over hand till I feel bottom, then I give it two fathoms more. Then I back down while letting the rode pay out through the roller as it will, because it pays out from the TOP of the pile on deck. I don't need to be there to guide it. When the rode snubs, I goose her in reverse till I'm sure the hook has set. Then I come to "stop" (idling in neutral). Then I go forward and haul in as many fathoms as it takes to come to the scope I want.

If it's gonna be a short stop in daylight and in reasonably gentle weather, I let the rode lie on deck. If, however, it's an overnight stop, I'll stow the rode in the chain locker so no-one will trip over it in the night.

There are many things in the realms of engineering that "don't scale". Handling ground tackle in a toy boat is NOT the same as handling ground tackle in a grown-up ship. To try to scale down the practices (and equipment) of ships -even small ones - isn't sensible IMO. Far better to develop practices that are apposite for the kind of boats, and indeed for the particular boat, we sail.

TP

[westwon]

Originally Posted by Cheechako

An electric is nice for sure. Especially if short handed. And in chop too.
You can move the boat forward and retrieve a lot of chain while it's not under strain.

In electrics I heavily favor a vertical windlass. They feed reliably and with little jamming etc. I did not have that experience with horizontals. Poor stripping, jams etc. A vertical can feed into a large PVC tube or etc and get the chain low in the bow.

If you DO go manual, get the fastest retrieval ratio possible. It seems like some of them you crank get a few inches at a time. A REAL PITA! It takes forever to retrieve. (Which is why I mentioned hand retrieval earlier )

One way:

Thanks Cheechako.


I really like the idea of a PVC pipe from the aft of anchor locker mounted windlass to the anchor locker. Hadn't thought of that!


Steve