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Deciding where to seek shelter with a storm on the way, particularly when far from home and in unfamiliar waters, can be one of the most stressful calls we voyagers are called upon to make. John shares his decision making process when choosing an anchorage to ride out a fall storm.

Most windlasses fitted to production cruising boats are simply inadequate and can leave you in very deep yogurt when things go wrong. In this chapter we show you what to look for in a good windlass and tell you about a feature, the lack of which contributes to about half of the dragging incidences we see.

There are probably more misconceptions and just plain wrong information circulating about anchor chain than most any other piece of cruising gear. For this chapter I went to the experts at Peerless Chain to get the real facts.

John writes about how we rig an anchor trip line on Morgan’s Cloud.

We have never seen the point of anchor swivels. In our opinion all they do is add a potential point of failure to the anchoring system and provide no benefits in return. But they are, in fact, even more dangerous than we thought. In this chapter we explain why and even tell you how to ameliorate the danger if you really must have a swivel.

Many anchoring experts advocate hybrid anchor rodes made up of a long length of chain attached to an even longer piece of rope. But is this really a good idea? We examine the practical real world issues in this chapter.

Over the years we have answered many questions about putting together a good anchor rode. In this chapter we have gathered some of those answers together.