Graham Hoyland's Seven Seas, Seven Summits

Weighing anchor is when you pull the muddy, shell-encrusted bit of rusty iron out of the mud and set off for a new port. But it also means borrowing a set of scales from the marina gym and seeing how much your anchors weigh, which I did the other day.

Curlew has a bright, stainless-steel main anchor which doesn’t seem to hold her 16 tons very well on its own, so I have three more anchors to hold her in position in a blow. The medallion-man trinklet weighs 60 pounds, as does its rusty-steel sister. Then there is a CQR (say it aloud) of 40 pounds, and an old Fisherman anchor (of the traditional style) of the same weight, which works well in kelp. So we have 200 pounds of anchors, which is still not enough.

Frankly anything would hold well in sand, even an old bicycle, but different anchors come into their own in difficult rocky or weedy bottoms. You have to make a judgement, and the other night in a wildly-rolling anchorage at Escondito, with a lee-shore 100 yards from our stern and half a gale blowing, I was very glad that I had put down the CQR and the main anchor in tandem, on the same heavy chain (we have 60 metres/200 feet). The Fisherman was standing by to be laid in case of dragging, which one of our companion boats proceeded to do towards the end of the night.

We stayed put, but for true peace of mind I want to find a Rocna anchor of around 100 pounds. This cunningly-shaped device flips over and digs in immediately, or so they say.