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Having had to drop anchor in great haste in the treacherous Carquinez Strait on one occasion myself- having run out of fuel 500 feet off the marina entrance in a 10+ knot ebbtide with a rocky shore 50' to port and a great bridge footing 200 yards astern: as all skippers know, the anchor is the 'soul of the ship':

 

And after waiting for the yearly-fee boat-tow service for two hours....we couldn't recover the anchor and had to cut the line! As the 200' line swiftly paid out in the current; and at the last 10 feet , I only then noticed that, sitting in it's flush deck-locker unused for 7 years, it wasn't connected to the boat and I barely got it cleated just in time using deck mooring cleat and the bow-pulpit pipe to arrest the powerless Catalina's rearward drift

You enter the narrow 50 yard wide channel between the jetties under power. A brisk cross-channel wind and current make steering a challenge. All of a sudden at the worst possible moment–your engine sputters and dies! Desperate now, you lean down and push the starter button–nothing doing. You send your sailing partner forward to get the anchor over the side. Your partner yells back that the anchor line has tangled and jammed! The jetty rocks to port–like a Great White’s gaping mouth–loom closer and closer…

Is your sailboat anchor and her ground tackle ready to deploy in ten seconds or less? In an emergency that might be how long you have to get it down and get it set!

Paper or Metal Insurance Policy?

Forget about paper insurance policies. When you need insurance nothing beats a well tested boat anchor to keep you from disaster. But there’s a lot more to it than that. Without the proper ground tackle–all the parts of the umbilical cord between the boat and the anchor–your anchor might as well be down below in the cabin.

Consider that in an emergency, you may have just ten seconds to get your anchor over the side.