Anchoring: A Ground Tackler’s Apprentice
by Rudy and Jill Sechez
Waterway Guide Media, 2016
Whether you’re a weekend warrior or long-distance power voyager, safe and effective anchoring is a critical skill. But it’s also an area some boaters tend to overlook.
In their new book, Anchoring: A Ground Tackler’s Apprentice, Rudy and Jill Sechez have compiled a series of important tips and lessons that novices and experts will find useful. They clearly know their stuff: The Sechezes have anchored through five hurricanes.
The book, published last year by Waterway Guide Media, covers the basics such as how to throw a rode, anchoring on different types of seabeds and use of tandem anchors. It also offers tips for choosing the right anchor size, design, strength and scope, and other necessities.
The authors, who live aboard their 34-foot cruiser Briney Bug, make clear the book was conceived to help boaters minimize and avoid anchor failures such as drags or breakouts. They offer detailed lessons in 12 easy-to-digest chapters focused on work loads, anchor sizing and strength, anchor designs, swivels, chain, anti-chafe techniques and other areas. The book has tables, an index and appendices, and a glossary for easy reference. There are also diagrams to illustrate key points.
Perhaps most important of all, the authors emphasize that successful anchoring requires foresight and planning as well as the knowledge to choose the right equipment.
“So anchoring isn’t just an anchor,” the authors write in the introduction, “it’s a complex, multi-part system, wherein, not only must each component possess the strength to exceed Mother Nature’s demands, but the components must also be able to interact with and rely on one another.”
They acknowledge this sounds simple, but success requires an anchoring system with no flaws. This book will help you get there.
Although Anchoring is relatively short at less than 200 pages, there are some redundancies, and some more experienced mariners will find they need to skip some material. But, overall, Rudy and Jill Sechez have produced an approachable, useful and easy-to-understand book on a complex subject.
