ANCHOR RODE RAIL ROLLER
© 2013
Tor Pinney - All Rights Reserved
The vertical windlass on my boat is designed to handle only one
anchor. However, like most cruisers I carry 2 bow anchors and
occasionally need to use both. So I came up with a handy and, I
believe, novel addition to the system that makes deployment of
the #2 anchor as automatic as the #1, and retrieval nearly so.
Picture the problem. A vertical windlass feeds the rode of just
one anchor in and out of the chain locker through a deck pipe
usually built into the windlass casing. In order for the
windlass to handle a second anchor rode from a separate deck
pipe, it is necessary to lay aside the #1 rode and hand-feed the
2nd rode to the chain or chain/rope gypsy. On Silverheels this
entailed pulling out the length of rode to be used and piling it
on deck just aft and to port of the windlass, where it could
then be hand-fed onto the gypsy as the windlass lowered the
anchor. This was awkward and, frankly, dangerous because one
slip, one moment of distracted attention, and the hand doing the
feeding was in mortal danger of loosing a couple of fingers in
that crushing steel machinery. Weighing anchor was slightly less
perilous but just as awkward, tailing the rode by hand as it
came around the gypsy, piling it on the deck, and then
afterwards hand-feeding it back through its deck pipe into the
chain locker.
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Then one day a simple solution occurred to me that has taken
most of the awkwardness and all of the danger out of using a
vertical anchor windlass with the second bow anchor. The fix
is a vertical anchor roller mounted on the port cap rail,
positioned so that the #2 rode coming from the starboard
deck pipe passes around it and then to the anchor windlass
gypsy at the correct angle. The windlass can then draw it
out of the chain locker as automatically as it does the #1's
rode through the port side deck pipe. |
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I still have to tail by hand when weighing the #2 anchor, but
thanks to the rail roller I do it positioned above the starboard
deck pipe, steadily feeding the rode back into the chain locker
without the intermediate mess of piling it on deck. Best of all,
my hands are safely distant from the turning windlass.
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