Our new anchor is actually one of the very first things that we bought for the boat. We had it ordered before we ever left Washington! Since it’s huge and heavy, Jason had it sent to his sister’s office at the bank since they can receive deliveries, however I gather that it was pretty unusual! The anchor has been in our storage shed until a few days ago when we emptied out the shed and it’s just been hanging out in the truck. Today we dropped the old anchor down and pulled all of the chain out of the boat so we could measure it. We have 200′ of chain and an additional 150′ of rope just in case! That’s a lot of chain for the Bahamas!
The old anchor looks like it has been sitting in saltwater its entire life and literally had flakes of metal falling off of it. We got out the trusty crescent wrenches and took it all apart.
After bashing the old anchor with the business end of a crescent wrench (both ends are the business end, they’re very useful!) we decided that while, technically, it’s repairable, we don’t have access to a welder or the time or desire to mess with it. Ideally we would have liked to swap this bigger anchor with the small spare anchor and essentially have an even larger spare anchor… but that’s not going to happen. We found someone online who wanted it, so problem solved!
With the anchor taken care of, we wanted to mark the chain. Everyone seems to do this in different increments using different methods… spray paint, colored zip ties, little chain inserts.. (our chain had all 3!) Jason and I decided to do marks every 25′ with white spray paint for no other reason than it was the only color paint we had on the boat. Easy decision!
Our new anchor is super fancy. It’s 65 lbs with a roll bar on the top so it will reset itself and dig in properly even if the boat does weird stuff. We had a bigger version on our wooden trawler and it was awesome. I won’t have to worry about the anchor dragging around in a storm now! 🙂
So there’s the new anchor! Luckily the chain was in good shape. The other day at the dock we scored upgraded chain for our spare anchor too, so we’re SET! 🙂
Since I’m up on top of the boat with this post, I’ll tell you about those dorade vents I started the other day! I finished up the bright white paint and polished the stainless. They sure do look nice up there!
We were on the boat today until 4 in the afternoon and it was 94 degrees inside the boat! 😮 That’s WAY too hot! I’m ready for it to start cooling down here, but I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon. Next on my list is a trip to Harbor Freight for some shade tarps!