The other day I was idly paging through the posts on a cruising forum about anchoring and marveling at the level of energy and emotion, not to mention the sheer volume of posts, that this subject seems to elicit.
I have to say that my first uncharitable thought was “Don’t these people have lives?”
But then I thought about the act of anchoring a bit more. In what other activity do we go to a location we have never seen before, drop a weird looking contraption into a place we can’t see (at least in most of the places we cruise), and then trust it to keep what is often our home and largest asset safe? To top all this off, we go to sleep, for crying out loud.
Even a big wall climber can at least look at and touch the anchor points holding his or her bivouac before drifting off into dreamland suspended above the abyss—OK, I have no idea how they do that either, but work with me on this.
No wonder we voyaging sailors fixate on anchors and anchoring.