The Best Anchor?

We seem to get a lot of questions about anchors and anchoring systems - especially after one of the magazines runs an evaluation article.

If you are always anchoring close to home, in a good holding bottom, and bring your anchor up by hand, then having the most efficient, lightest weight anchor for your conditions makes sense.

But once you start to cruise a bit, and some of those anchorages become less than perfect, you need a good all-around anchor. From our experience, there is nothing that will touch the Bruce in this category. Yes, it is not the most efficient hook in terms of holding power per pound of anchor, but in thin sand over coral, or rock it is unbeatable (and these are amongst the toughest situations). What we do is go up on size a notch or two - for example, on the Sundeer 56/60 we specified a 110 pound (50kg) Bruce. In a lot of conditions you could get away with a much lighter version of another anchor, but this is enough weight to hold the boat in a poor bottom in a real blow, and in a good bottom you can anchor on very short scope.