Anchor roller project over

It seems we've been fooling with the new anchor and anchor roller forever, but on Saturday, with the temperature at 57 degrees, we finally got the roller roller mounted. We used the roller itself as a template and drilled the three 3/8-inch holes in the pulpit. We also plugged the old holes to protect the core in the pulpit. We used three 3/8-inch x 2-inch stainless bolts, nuts and fender washers. You could dance on the damn thing now.

We ended up mounting the roller much further forward than we originally thought. In a previous chapter of this blog, we showed how we experimented with the mounting position. Farther back, the new hinged plow anchor looked like it just might whack the hull on the way up so we went out as far as we could.

Today we drove off to the boatyard with everything we needed except the new anchor. We'll attach the anchor tomorrow and then run it up and down a few times to see how it works.

While we had a nice warm day, we crawled under the boat to check the props, rudders and zincs. No digs in the props and there are a couple of zincs that we won't have to change. Looks like we'll have to run a wire wheel over the rudders and props to get rid of the tiny little shellfish that we always seem to collect. The power washing takes most of them off but we do have lots of little white circles left. You can see them in the video we made today.

We also walked down to the river and saw it in a way that we rarely do. It was completely still, with lots of ice fragments. No tidal movement at all. We suspect that there was just enough snow melt to hold the tide steady. Just north of the marina, the river was still all ice but with a nice channel cut through it. We have to assume that the path through the ice was made by the Coast Guard Harbor Tug Bollard earlier in the week. The Bollard patrols the Connecticut River every winter to break ice and is always a welcome sight when the weather is really cold and the river is frozen over.

Here's some video. It's only two minutes but making videos helps us renew our video editing skills, some of which we haven't used in quite a while.



On Sunday, we mounted the new anchor on the anchor line and pulled it up. We noticed that if we ran the anchor up until it wouldn't go any farther (actually, when the eye on the end of the anchor line hits the mouth of the windlass), the anchor would jam at the roller just behind the anchor hinge. To get it to release, we had to give it a shove and we obviously can't do that when we are trying to anchor. We needed to shorten the chain slightly.

To do that we lowered the anchor back down and removed two extra shackles that for some reason had been added to either ends of the chain over the years. That made the chain about two inches shorter. The anchor then dropped fairly predictably but to make it exact, we'll have to remove one link of chain. We didn't have tools with us to cut the chain today, but we'll put that on the list and fine tune the chain length over the next few weeks.

Merry Christmas, everyone.