Best type of anchor

piercewv

New Member
I need to buy an anchor for my boat. Any suggestions about the best type of anchor? The anchors most in my price range are: the folding grapnel anchor, a steel claw anchor, a "quick set" fluke anchor, or a mushroom anchor. All of those anchors are on westmarine.com and run around 20-30 bucks. Thoughts?
 
Anchor styles

West Marines Catalog lists the attributes of the anchors you have described, it all depends on the bottom conditions of where you said. I went with a seven lb folding grappnel, as the lake I sail is mostly rocky.
 
Anchors: storage

I think the type of bottom, how serious you are about holding power, and how you store the anchor are important when you ask what type anchor is best. I have a 10 pound mushroom anchor and I don't think it holds as well as the folding garplin (sp?) anchor, but it is adequate for me. I just plan to use an anchor while I am in the boat fishing or having lunch or resting in a protected bay, so holding power is not critical. Storage is always an issue with an anchor. You try to clean it off before bringing it aboard, but it always seems some gunk sticks to it. Also, you don't want the metal to scratch the gel coat. Perhaps a canvas bag or bucket would be nice for storing the anchor and rode. One cool trick if you want more holding power on your anchor is to add a kellet (or sentinel) to the anchor line. It can be any kind of weight (I have used an old lead divers weight) added 5 to 10 feet from the anchor. It has the effect of a chain in holding the line down at a low angle so it is more difficult to pull the anchor out. On big boat the kellet is sent down on a carabiner on a separate line attached to the rode. I'll add a drawing to this later, my PhotoShop isn't responding at the moment.
 

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I bought an anchor a few weeks ago at west marine. They have a chart for the size anchor compared to your boat. The Capri puts you into the second from the smallest garplin anchor they have. I think its 5 lbs. The anchor is just 25% of the cost of the set up. You need 100 feet of rope, a 5 foot chain, and 2 shackles. I boat the pre-made 100 foot of rope for an anchor they sell for 50 bucks made by west marine. It comes with a metal eye or 5 dollars less a plastic eye spliced in.

Before I bought this setup I thought I could get by with some rope I had on hand and a 3 lbs. claw anchor. I think that setup might hold me if I was floating on an inner tube but it didn't hold my sailboat.

I've used the new setup 3 times and it worked well. Twice on a lake and once in a sound.
 
forgot to mention the 100 foot of rope is because the anchor needs to be parallel as possible to the lake bottom. Even with chains and weights to get this angle you need a lot of rope. The guy in the store said it was a 4:1 ratio or something like that. In 10 feet of water you need 40 feet of rope out.
 

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