Hi. I'm Greg with Bennington Marine. Today, we're going to be talking about anchors.
[WATER SPLASHING]
First anchor we're going to start with is what's called a coated Tri-Fluke anchor. You'll notice that it's notched out. And these will help grab a little bit into the bottom of the lake, which is nice. This is ideal if you're in a softer bottom or a mucky type bottom on the lake or a river. It's just going to secure the boat pretty well and keep you in place.
With the Tri-Fluke anchor, it comes in different weights. So if you have a shorter boat, you can use a lighter weight. I think they start anywhere from around 10 pounds, go up to 30 pounds, roughly. And obviously, the larger the boat you get, the heavier the anchor you want. So being the Tri-Fluke, we just toss it right on out.
[WATER SPLASHING]
So now you see that we've got the anchor down in the water, you're going to notice, it's not mucky here. It's a little more solid. So the anchor didn't really sit down into the bottom of the lake. But what you got to do is just basically pull it. And you see how it got where it's starting to dig in now. And that's how you actually set the anchor. So in your boat, that's going to set it right there and hold you in place better.
Another style of anchor is what's called the Danforth anchor. You're going to notice, it's got the little prongs. Those are going to actually help dig in to the bottom. So this is a great anchor when you use it on like a river bottom that's more gravelly or sandy, same thing on a lot of the lakes. If it's real a solid bottom, this is perfect for that type of use.
Basically, what we'll do, and we'll show you here in a little bit. But you've got the anchor itself, a couple shackles that tie this chain to it. And when we throw it out, the anchor will land on the bottom, and the chain will actually help drag it and secure it in the bottom. So it's going to dig into the bottom of the lake, as we'll show you. And that's going to keep the boat more secure. So great for anchoring off a pontoon like this or speedboat, but great to anchor you off, and just head into the wind, and put this anchor down in.
Here, we have a Danforth anchor. And this is designed to use the chain because the chain is what sets the anchor. So we're just going go ahead and toss it out.
[METAL CLANGS]
So you'll see that the chain actually helps drive the tips of the anchor down in to secure the anchor. This obviously isn't an anchor but it's an auger. But this is really useful if you're in, say, shallow water or you're at the sandbar and you want to secure the boat.
Obviously, it's pretty self-explanatory. You just take the T handles, turn it down into the bottom with the auger. You're going to secure off to this area here.
The nice thing about this is if you're at the sandbar, nobody's going to step on it like they would an anchor, where they can't see it. This is going to be sticking up just a little bit out of the water so they'll be able to know where the bank-- the boat is actually being secured at.
OK, we found the location where we want to anchor off. A couple helpful tips. We want to make sure we turn our engine off. I like to put the key on the dash, reminds me to lift the anchors before I leave. Take your safety lanyard off. And like I said, make sure that the engine is turned off before you leave the captain's seat. And also keep in mind, if somebody is going to go outside the rail for any reason, the engine should be turned off and then in neutral.
Now that we have the boat turned off, the bow heading into the wind or into the current, we can get ready to throw our Danforth anchor out. But one thing, make sure you tie off the other end of the anchor because we don't want to lose it. Here we go.
[METAL CLANGS]
[WATER SPLASHING]
Now that we have our anchor set, we're going to go ahead and tie it off to the boat. Easiest way in this situation is just make yourself a big loop, large enough to go through the cleat and back around.
Now we have our front secured. There may be days when it's windy, like today, or the current is trying to pivot the back end of the boat around, that's when the second anchor might come in handy. And we can use the Tri-Fluke that we talked about earlier in the back part of the boat. We'll just toss that out.
For more tips, go to BenningtonMarine.com.
