The Offshore Voyaging Reference Site

John’s Thoughts & Photos, November 2013

It’s amazing how often we see this: an otherwise substantial anchoring set up totally compromised by one small detail. Can you spot it? Please leave a comment. Just to keep things simple, I’m only talking about the starboard anchor.

The Futility of Growth

Matt Marsh, AAC Technical Correspondent, has started a fascinating and worthwhile project over at his own site: a look at alternatives to our growth based economies. It’s not about offshore voyaging, but it sure is relevant to what we do.

Anyone who can do basic math should be able to understand that our current addiction to, and dependence on, growth is not going to end well in a finite world. Matt has way more math than average and couples that with a lot of common sense, so his take on the subject will be both interesting and useful.

By the way, Matt is not alone in his concern. Jeremy Grantham, one of the world’s most successful investors, shares the same concerns in his April 2011 newsletter, backed up with some pretty startling numbers:

Four years ago I was talking to a group of super quants, mostly PhDs in mathematics, about finance and the environment. I used the growth rate of the global economy back then – 4.5% for two years, back to back – and I argued that it was the growth rate to which we now aspired.

To point to the ludicrous unsustainability of this compound growth I suggested that we imagine the Ancient Egyptians … whose gods, pharaohs, language, and general culture lasted for well over 3,000 years.

Starting with only a cubic meter of physical possessions (to make calculations easy), I asked how much physical wealth they would have had 3,000 years later at 4.5% compounded growth.

Now, these were trained mathematicians, so I teased them: “Come on, make a guess. Internalize the general idea. You know it’s a very big number.” And the answers came back: “Miles deep around the planet,” “No, it’s much bigger than that, from here to the moon.”

Big quantities to be sure, but no one came close. In fact, not one of these potential experts came within one billionth of 1% of the actual number, which is approximately 10 to the 57th power, a number so vast that it could not be squeezed into a billion of our Solar Systems…

…The bottom line really, though, is that no compound growth can be sustainable. Yet, how far this reality is from the way we live today, with our unrealistic levels of expectations and, above all, the optimistic outcomes that are simply assumed by our leaders.

The key point that I took away from this is “that no compound growth can be sustainable”. It doesn’t matter if you use 4.5% or 1%, eventually things will end badly if we don’t figure out a way to break our addiction, as a species, to growth.

You can read the full news letter, although access requires that you register with Mr. Grantham’s investment company. The good news is that registration is free and will give you access to a huge amount of common sense investing advice.

OK, Who Has the Biggest Lens Now?

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Ken

That shackle looks a little flimsy!

Dave

No swivel?

Chris

Shackle Pin not secured?

Bill

Seems to me the shackle pin diameter is mismatched to the hole in the anchor – it could be a good deal bigger. Also not a fan of stainless in this area…
Our system uses 2 shackles: pins go through last link and through the hole in the anchor – allowing a bit more heft in this area.

constant

Shackle and chain must be well sized, and this we can not comment just with a picture. Wichard gives following data : working load for a 12mm stainless steel shackle is 3600Kg (ref 17.4PH), whereas standard chain working load (diameter 12, grade 40) is 2500Kg. Best reference for me is this Wichard shackle, but with top quality chain grade 80 (working load 5300Kg, breaking load 21tons). No comment about windlass, seems to be ok ?
Fanch

Joe Blowe

Get a real shackle and safety wire it!

Nick Kats

Shackle undersized, must be absolute maximum diameter.
SS shackle less desireable than galvanized (not as strong, is brittle vs elasticity of galvanized steel, and there may be corrosion issues especially if the anchor is deployed a lot). But there may be very high grade SS shackles available.
Shackle probably is moused. But again there are shackles that self-lock. (I have a couple of these, but I still mouse them).
There seems to be a pin running through the anchor stock, which secures the mounted anchor. So the owner drilled a hole through the stock. This weakens the stock. How much I don’t know from the engineering perspective, but I would never ever do this.
Last link in chain might be oversized, to accept a larger shackle, but this is not crucial.
And, last, where is the wench to winch her in? Huge omission!!! Heck!

Alex Blackwell

Besides the above, no chafe protector on dock line and the dockline is liable to be cut by starboard anchor

Tony Weatherford

Should be using a proper sized galvanized shackle that is safety wired properly.

Fuss

Well my thoughts are….
(Apart from the hole drilled in the shank and the shackle and shank hole being incompatible)…..the bow roller construction has too much overhang and is not massive enough to break an anchor out without bending maybe.

joec

1. SS shackle not galvanized nor does it appear seized.
2. Anchor not secured properly to boat, the chain appears to be piled below the gypsy (not to mention fact that gypsy/windlass should not be used to secure the anchor.
3. Anchor roller is while flimsy to the eye, one would hope that the snubber is led through the hawsepipe to the bollard

richard e. stanard (s/v lakota)

i,ve not seen a rocna (sp ?) anchor first hand, which this appears to be or some variation thereof, but is that a hinge i see there where the stock meets the flukes ? that would be a potential weak link in my mind

cheers

Wilhelm

The shackle looks stainless. Should be galvanized.

Chris

Ditto

scott flanders

Al Golden’s worst nightmare. Of course real cruisers have elongated chain links on the ends with boy attachment gear, not girl stuff.

Fuss

I don’t see a problem with a stainless shackle as long as it is a calibrated one, can be moused and is from a known brand like Wichard. It won’t remove much galvanizing and Wichard ones are stronger than galvanized for a similar size. The problem is that the hole is not elongated which means that the shackle cannot take a side load and is undersized.
As I said before, I would also be worried about the bow roller overhang.

Erik de Jong

There is nothing wrong with a stainless shackle, as long as it is of the low-carbon type stainless and properly sized (the one in the picture is not properly sized).
I would never want to use a shackle with an eye on the pin that is wider than the shackle because it will get stuck behind something at some point in time and turns into a nightmare to untangle.
In fact, I would never use a shackle at all, a proper, stainless, anchor swivel should be used.

Geoff Caesar

A galvanised shackle should be used. I would go larger and sieze the pin with Monel wire, too.

I once used a stainless shackle to connect galvanised chain to a galvanised anchor; several months of regular anchoring later I had to cut off about four feet of chain as it was seriously corroded. The anchor was fine, but that was much, much newer than the chain so perhaps benefitted from a higher level of protection.

David Head

I cannot see from the image any device to stop the anchor going ‘freefall’

Ken

Shackle on starboard anchor looks undersized and possibly stainless on a galvanized chain and anchor.

websailr

I agree with joec that the windlass should not take the strain from the set anchor. There should be a chain claw and a lever or other pull device to take the load off the winch.

chris

As above the shackle should not be stainless steel. However no one mentioned that the shackle is attached backwards. The pin should go through the chain not the anchor.

Chris

To add to my comment above. That’s not a Rocna anchor. A Rocna (or Manson) for that matter would have a slot to accept a large shackle oriented correctly. Come on John give us a hard one. 🙂

Ken Page

The bit of a surprise here, is that the port anchor looks to be fine with two properly sized shackles. Can’t see the mousing, but it makes me think this picture caught the owner at a time of transition for his starboard anchor.

Ken Page

A better look …the port anchor looks to me to be moused!

RDE (Richard Elder)

For Matt: the best layman’s introduction I’ve seen for understanding why exponential growth is a mathematical impossibility:
http://www.peakprosperity.com/crashcourse (see chapter 3)

And just to round out the day, research the technical difficulty that an obviously incompetent Japan faces in decommissioning the massive quantity of damaged fuel rods stored on top of the rickety buildings* housing the three reactors that have melted cores burning their way into the ground water acqifer. Worst case scenario— total evacuation of Japan and substantial radiation impact on the US west coast.

*thanks General Electric for a design that only a brain dead engineer could conceive of.

Rorik

There is a company called 1st chain supply that makes alloy shackles. They have roughly the same SWL as the chain to which they’re attached. I have no affiliation to them but the anchor setup in the picture needs one of their shackles. And a cover for the chain pipe.

Dick Stevenson

John,
I am unable to see the mousing, so I am unclear what you are referring to as incorrect. More importantly, what would you see as better?
An FYI: There seems to be a new comments format which showed the last comments first (after clicking “comments”) until I clicked “previous comments”, an instruction that did not appear till the bottom after I had confusingly read comments referring to comments I had not seen or read and, at that point, did not know how to get to. That was confusing, but I hope you get the idea. It is too early in the morning to sort the above sentence out.
Dick Stevenson, s/v Alchemy

Fuss

Hmm, so no one else seems too worried about the roller overhang.

Also the pendants through the hawsepipes could also get caught on the overhang (anchors removed of course) if moored to a buoy and the weather went bad.

Nick Kats

Fuss (?), really good one about roller overhang. Hard to tell in this pic about this one. But I’ve often seen on other boats flimsy roller overhangs that promise to bend or rip downwards when the boat is riding at anchor in a bad chop.

Laurent

Ecology in 2013 reminds me of object programming in #1995.
In those days very few people did it, but everybody was certain that object programming was the inescapable future, that the correct answer belonged to the Object Management Group and that this solution was the Common Object Request Broker Architecture Specifications.
In short : converting to object programming was an historic necessity, and any object programming technique that didn’t get exacting OMG and CORBA stamps was anathema.
18 years later, object programming has become commonplace, generally without much fuss about it, but not as much as anticipated, and the very few object-addict OMG opponents of #1995 proved to be so obviously right that everybody has just forgotten they even existed (perhaps it is just a too painful memory for institutions….. or institutionalized counter-cultures).
I understand that today’s message is that “ecology is the inescapable future”, but current institutions and institutionalized counter-cultures are still explaining that you need to replace your car every 5 years or so to benefit from the latest catalytic-converter or particule-filter and pay your 5-yearly contribution to the automobile industry, even if mathematics applied to ecology seems to suggest very different behaviors.

I guess one message from the 90′ which seems to have been unduly forgotten, is that using the latest numeric goods and assets can be ecologicaly very clean and efficient, provided consumers use them with long, or very long, lifecycle material goods. For instance using the latest computer OS and applications with 10 years + old computers, 20 years + old cars and 600 years + old houses.

Seems that current ecological communication completely miss this kind of possible development path….

Dick Stevenson

Erik, I would wish to suggest, for a variety of reasons, that a swivel of any material is never warranted in an anchor system. I would be surprised if reasons for the above statement have not been covered in AAC writings elsewhere. If not (or if there is disagreement), I can write further on my reasons for the above statement.
Dick Stevenson