Anchor Snubber

Everyone we have talked to has said this has been a horrible summer here. That has been our experience as well. We planned to go to Great Mercury and Waiheke Islands but it was not to be. A gale was forecast for Thursday and a Storm is forecast for Saturday so that left us with two travel days to get north. After the first day the gale arrived as predicted and things got a bit noisy at anchor with the anchor chain.

In response to a recent post, Val (from Hull 7), suggested that we use a snubber to cut down on the racket from the anchor chain dragging over the bow roller. I have been reluctant to do so since it will also cut down on our ability to here the anchor drag, but I think I am turning the corner on this after last night on the hook.

From the following photo you can see the track of the boat (in red) during the course of the night. The winds weren’t particularly strong (up to 25 knots) but they were shifty and you can see the boat shifting back and forth with the wind. As a side note, you can see the wind shift with the frontal passage as Iron Lady swung round to the north.

We had great holding in mud with 30 meters of chain in 6 meters of water so dragging was most unlikely. On occasion, when Iron Lady reached the end of arcs and shifted back the other way, the anchor chain would shift on the bow roller with a resounding thunk. No sleeping thru that, so time to try out the snubber.

On our old trawler, we had to use a bridle as there no fairlead to run the snubber thru. It was a fairly significant pain to hook up the bridle as we had to lean out over the bow pulpit and hook up the chain hook to the chain (which frequently fell off and we had to go thru the process again).

Enter the nice big fairlead on the 64 directly in line with the anchor. Add in a nice big Sampson post to secure the snubber line to and you have the makings of a good system – except for the chain hook which I don’t like.

Prior to coming down this time, I asked Steve Dashew about his system and he turned me on to a titanium snap shackle that snaps securely over the chain – no more chain hooks falling off. A bit pricey at USD 120, but, hey, that’s boating.

Set up couldn’t be much easier. Run the tag end of the snubber thru the fairlead and tie it off to the Sampson post. Snap the shackle on chain from safety of the foredeck. Let out the chain with the shackle attached with the windlass control in the forepeak and your done. Retrieval is just as easy.

Note to you seaman types – this is just the trial version of a snubber. Today we are going to make up a proper one with shackle spliced to the line.