Sovereign Nations

…One must have a completely different rig than the one we had, and I do mean, had.

…As jankey as it looked it was a workable rig for gunkholing up the Chesapeake bay which it did for us very well over the past 3 years. But, for our future adventures, we’re going to need a much more substantial rig to help us sleep at night in our busy anchorages to come.

The rig above shows off a very simple Bruce claw with 25 feet of 5/16th galvanized chain attached to 150 feet of 5/8 inch 3 strand rode. It works great in mud up to 15 feet…

…And this will not do.

Although we did manage to pull ourselves off a pretty nasty grounding once, this windlass set up is just not strong enough for deeper water anchorages using much more chain and a longer rode.

So,

… We got all dressed up and demo’d that old anchor roller that was knocking the anchor against the fore-stay, the flush-deck, feather-weight Simpson-Lawrence windlass and those god-damn-loose-ass bronze cleats on the bow.

Now we can work here!

…Well, maybe I didn’t get so dressed up, but we did get an idea for what we were going to put on the bow to replace our old and inadequate system of anchoring.

With the fore-deck cleared of all the old deck fittings, let the repairs begin.

…Ground and filled.

Now we get to build a twin bow roller system that  won’t chafe on our sailing rig but will carry our trusty old shallow-water anchor rig along with a brand new 35# CQR with at least 200 feet of 5/16 chain. Both anchors will run  through our new above-deck windlass into our newly partitioned chain-locker.

…And this is how we’re doing it.

First we took the deck all the way down to the original fiberglass (L).

…We built a jig for the epoxy bases that will support the bow rollers (M).

Then we mixed the epoxy up with some colloidal silica and poured it into the jig (R).

…Now we let the thing set up.

The next step will be to fill-and-fair the epoxy bases so they make a good and fair mounting surface for the two bow rollers to bolt to.