Hello and welcome to the Sailing the East podcast.  This is our podcast about sailing and cruising the East coast of the United States.   In some episodes we will focus on passages and destinations, in other episodes, we will talk about boats, equipment, and techniques, and when we come across an interesting person, we will try to get them as a guest on the show.

Today we’re are going to talk about the new anchor chain I purchased and installed on Paradox, our 2009 Hunter 45 DS. As a reminder, we purchased Paradox in the Fall of 2020 and she came with 25 feet of anchor chain and 200 feet of ⅝ 3 strand nylon rode.

After doing some reading and given the type of sailing we do, I decided on 100 ft of chain. The anchor windless is a Lewmar V2 with both a gypsy and a drum. On Lewmar winches there is a code stamped into the gypsy. The code on my gypsy is 002 which according to the Lewmar website means the proper chain is 10mm DIN 766 or ⅜ G4.

This is interesting because the chain that came with the boat is 5/16 G4.  The 5/16 chain seems to work OK in the windless, but I just deployed it once. You must be careful because the wrong size chain can jam or prematurely wear out the gypsy.  So, I ordered ACCO brand ⅜ G4 anchor chain from Defender.  Defender is a great place and I find they consistently have the best prices.  There are lots of brands of anchor chain and in reading forums, ACCO seems to be one of the best.  Seems like the big variable in anchor chain is the quality of the galvanization.  So a good quality galvanization is important. The next thing I needed to figure out was how to get the anchor chain from the car to the boat and then onto the boat.  100 feet of ⅜ chain weighs about 160 pounds.  What I came up with are using three 5gal pails to carry the chain.  At Defender, we put about ⅓ of the chain in each pail.  So each weighs just a bit over 50lbs. When I got to the marina, I was able to load all 3 pails into a cart and take them down to the boat. At the boat, I was able to get each bucket, one by one, onto the boat and forward to the anchor locker.

I then, one pail at a time, flaked the chain into the chain locker.  I then ran it through the anchor windless and attached the end to the anchor with a new shackle I purchased.

I still need to splice the nylon rode to the end of the anchor chain.  But for the time being, I secured the end of the anchor chain with a line to the eye hook in the anchor locker. I will splice the nylon rode to the anchor the next time I am at the boat.  BTW, I did find 2 great YouTube videos on how to splice a line to an anchor chain.  One was by Free Range Sailing and the other by Dalton Brand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqVF4NcpqXs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E6W-Y9gNok

So, all in all, getting a new anchor chain worked out well.  The 3 bucket idea for carrying and moving the chain around worked out great.

Thanks for listening!  We will be spending most of the summer sailing around Narragansett Bay, Long Island Sound, and Buzzards Bay.  Hope to see you out on the water.

We love to hear from our listeners, send us your questions, comments, and suggestions at [email protected].  If you would like to support the podcast, click on the sponsorship link below.  For as little as 99 cents a month, you can help defray the costs of producing this podcast.  Wishing you fair winds, and calm seas.

Bela and Mike