Even more anchor roller

We're itching to mount the new anchor roller and anchor but still can't figure out how far forward to mount the roller on the pulpit.  This week we did some reading on the subject and even asked about it on the Silverton Owner's Club forum. We only got one direct answer and that was to "mount it so the front edge of the roller extends 3-4 inches past the front of the pulpit. Fine, but that will put the anchor farther back than it was with the old anchor roller that held the little Danforth anchor.

Another SOC member (one that really seems to know what he's talking about) noted that he had trouble releasing the plow type anchor on his previous boat. He said that someone would have to go forward and give the anchor a kick before it would drop. We checked another site that we like (The Hull Truth) and found some similar comments.

What to do? Frances came up with the idea of temporarily clamping the anchor roller to the pulpit, mounting the anchor on it and then see what happens when we hit the "down" on the windlass. We're going to do that tomorrow after we stop and invest in a half dozen more c-clamps.

It seemed colder than the 40 degrees shown on the thermometer on the boat when we arrived today. Our little electric heater added 10 degrees in about a half hour but today, we needed to work outside.

We covered the front deck section with a blue tarp. No sense in exposing the boat (and the inflatable that is being stored there) to all the dirt that will blow through the shed during the winter.

We also removed the teak trim strips that serve as step pads when getting on the boat.

There's enough wood left to refinish them once or twice more before we have to give up and resort to the usual step pads that most boats use.  We refinished these strips three years ago and they don't look all that bad considering they have been stepped on about a thousand times since then.

Before we left on Saturday, we removed the hideous framed "thing" that Silverton put on all of these boats for a number of years.

It always looked like a cheap piece o' shit to us.  Frances has some ideas about what she'd like to put up there in its place. Of course, that means that the wall where that thing hung will have to be repainted as will the wall to the right in this photo, were we pried off some junk that the previous owner had mounted there. We're going to use the same color paint that we used when we refurbished all the doors and cabinet fronts a few years ago. That still looks like new even today.

We guess that the corner molding in the picture could use a little help too, so we'll add that to the list.

That list keeps getting longer but we love doing this stuff during the winter.

Sunday was gray and cold or at least seemed pretty cold to us.  We stopped at Harbor Freight and bought four five-inch c-clamps for $5 each and then headed to the boatyard with the anchor roller and the new anchor in the trunk. We also brought numerous plywood shims, just in case we had difficulty clamping the roller to the pulpit.

The railing around the pulpit looks crooked in this picture but it isn't. We just weren't standing directly in front of it when we took the picture.

We plugged the boat in, fired up the heater in the cabin and put on our gloves. Everything metal felt  like ice. We put up our extension ladder and then clamped the roller to the pulpit. We were able to fit just two clamps but it seemed sturdy enough.

Frances was stationed on the fly bridge where she would work the windlass. I explained that to operate the windlass, you pulled the switch out (to unlock it) and then pushed it up to raise the anchor or down to lower the anchor.

Then Bill went down to watch just how the anchor behaved when it was pulled up through the new roller from where we had it staged on the ground in front of the boat.

If you listen to the sound carefully in this short video clip, you will hear us sounding something like George and Gracie. If you are a lot younger than we are, you probably won't know who George and Gracie were and that's your loss. They were funny and we laughed when we edited this sequence thinking about how we sounded like them..



The results of our test showed us that the anchor will right itself once it gets to the roller. The new roller will accommodate the plow anchor but we'll have to mount the roller much farther forward to get the anchor shaft to seat properly and to keep the hinged plow on the anchor from hitting the underside of the pulpit while underway.

We made some marks on the roller to show where to drill mounting holes, put everything away and went home. Mission accomplished at least for this weekend.