This past weekend, we upgraded the anchor chain on Lulu. When we bought Lulu, the information clearly stated that there were 5 meters of anchor chain, and I just assumed that it was a typo and there were 50 meters. No, there were only 5 meters; the rest was rope. This was not a problem for the type of sailing that the former owner did; however for cruising we need more chain.
If you have been reading our blogs, we debated on which type of chain to buy. Ultimately we decided on going from 10mm galvanized to 8mm high-test galvanized; which is at least as strong as the 10mm but smaller and therefore weighs less. Having a lot of weight in the anchor locker isn’t the best for sailing performance, plus the 10mm chain takes up a lot more space. Our new chain fits very nicely in the locker and weighs only half of what the 10mm chain weighed.
In terms of attaching the chain to the boat, we read several blog posts from experienced sailors. The piece of rope that connects the chain to the boat is called “the bitter end”. If your anchor gets stuck and you need to leave it; you can cut off your chain at the bitter (rope) end and let it sit there until you can come back for it. The idea is that you can attach a fender or some other floating item to the bitter end or chain, so that it will be easy to locate and access. However, it may also be that the reason you can’t spend time trying to free your anchor is that you are in a hurry. For that scenario, we took the advice of one person and made our bitter end a floating line. That way there is a chance that even if we have to leave in a hurry, we can find our chain by locating the floating bit. That’s the red bag with the red and yellow line in the picture.
When we took out the old chain and rope, we discovered that there was an additional storage space under the chain locker – a chain locker for extra chain. We may choose to split our new chain into two 50-meter lengths and store 50 meters until we need to put out a longer chain; but for now we have a nice long new chain and we have lots of time to reflect on whether or not we want to store some of it. The storage space is of course really well built with a reinforced opening and a special hook to attach the chain to for easy retrieval. After all, this is Lulu.
Because we now have a smaller chain, we had to replace the gypsy on our windlass. We are keeping the 10mm one, as we may need to replace the chain one day and not have access to 8mm high-test. In that case it will be very likely that we store 50 meters and only have 50 meters up in the chain locker.
