Hi I'm Mike Vatelero from Boat US Magazine I'm here on my boat today to
show you how to make a combination anchor road when I say combination I
mean an anchor road made up of three strand nylon line and a length of chain
between the line and the anchor and to understand a little bit as to why you
might want to add a length of chain to your anchor road you need to understand
a little bit about how an anchor works
a lot of people think an anchor works because it's heavy that's not exactly
the case an anchor works because of its design and if you've got a Danforth style
anchor like this one with these big flukes it's designed to be pulled
horizontally across the bottom and if you notice you can imagine this being
pulled along the bottom those flukes they're going to dig into the sand mud
what-have-you and that's how this anchor develops it's holding power but you can
also imagine that it doesn't take much angle of upward pull before those flukes
just aren't going to have the chance to bite and hold the bottom so when we talk
about anchoring we talk about deploying enough scope for the water depth what we
really mean is that anchor line needs to be laying flush on the bottom, needs to
be being pulled relatively horizontal to the bottom to give the anchor a chance to
do its job the way that we cheat at deploying scope is by adding something
heavy to the end of the anchor line and that is of course our chain and I'll
show you how to connect them up right now.
So to get started you're going to
need a few things of course you're going to need a length of chain more about
that in a second you're going to need your anchor road
now mine came pre-spliced with the thimble in it if you don't have some
chafe protection in your existing road you may want to consider going out and
getting a plastic thimble like this or adding some form of chafe protection and
then you're going to need a pair of anchor shackles and the only thing to
remember about the shackles is to make sure that the opening in the shackle
will clear the diameter of your line your chain and your cymbal you'll also
want some seizing wire and a pair of cutting pliers for our last step which
is going to be to seize the shackle shut and while I'm on the topic make sure
that you're buying anchor shackles that have a hole in the pin so that you can
do that last step now about the chain you notice here I'm replacing this old
Beaton decoded chain with some nice fancy stainless chain and this is
actually only only about five feet of chain and I know what you're saying some
of you out there that's not enough well certainly adding even a short length of
chain will greatly improve the holding power over an all nylon Road but if
you've got to anchor in rocky conditions if you anchor overnight or she's got a
bigger however your boat a lot of people
recommend at least half the boat lengths in chain or even as much as a full boat
length worth of chain just remember that if you're going to carry that much chain
you probably need some place to put it and then every time you go to pull the
anchor you're going to be lifting all that chain in addition to the anchor if
you've got the space and your boats not impacted by the extra weight forward go
for it if you don't try adding just a few feet and seeing if it get you to
where you need to be holding wise.
So of course the first step is to use our
shackles and our pins and tie everything together now once you've done that you
need to go back and seize the shackles and I'll show you how to do that in a
second. So to put this together, I took my anchor shackles and used it to
join the road and the chain together and now I need to seize the shackle shut so
it won't go anywhere won't be able to come loose so to do that I've got a
little bit of seizing wire which I've bent into a u or staple shape and I've
got a pair of pliers with a cutting edge so I can trim the wire when I'm done all
I'm going to do is take one end of that u and pass it through the pin and one
end and pass it through the opening in the shackle and then the end that went
through the shackle I need to double back and pass it through the pin so that
they cross depending on your finger strength you may need to use the pliers
to pull that tight and then you're just going to come back over the end of the
pin and start to twist and definitely grab the pliers at this point so you can
finish the job so what you're going to do is keep twisting until that opening
there comes tight against the side of the shackle just like a twist tie on the
bread and then use the cutting edge and just clean it up there you have it seized
shackle on a combination anchor road hope you learned something today for
more videos go to BoatUS.com/Magazine