Anchor

:For alternate meanings see anchor (disambiguation)

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The purpose of a ship's or boat's anchor is to attach the vessel to the ground at a specific point. There are two primary classes of anchors - temporary and permanent. A permanent anchor is often called a mooring, and is rarely moved; it's quite possible the vessel cannot hoist it aboard but must hire a service to move or maintain it. A temporary anchor is usually carried by the vessel, and hoisted aboard whenever the vessel is under way.

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An anchor works by resisting the movement force of the vessel which is attached to it. There are two primary ways to do this - via sheer mass, and by "hooking" into the seabed. It may seem logical to think wind and currents are the largest forces an anchor must overcome, but actually the vertical movement of waves develop the largest loads, and modern anchors are designed to use a combination of technique and shape to resist all these forces.

Related Topics:
Seabed - Waves

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The kind of anchor you probably envision is a temporary anchor, the kind which might be carried aboard a ship or a boat. A modern temporary anchor usually consists of a central bar called the shank, and an armature with some form of flat surface (fluke or palm) to grip the bottom and a point to assist penetration of the bottom; the position at which the armature is attached to the shank is called the crown, and the shank is usually fitted with a ring or shackle to attach it to the cable. There are many variations and additions to these basic elements--for example, the whole class of anchors which include a stock such as the fisherman and fluke anchors.

Related Topics:
Ship - Boat - Cable - Fisherman - Fluke

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A permanent anchor, on the other hand, may come in a wide range of types and has no standard form. A slab of rock with an iron staple in it to attach a chain to serves very well, as does a Chevy long-block motor. Modern moorings may be anchored by sand screws which look and act very much like over-sized screws drilled into the seabed, or by barbed metal beams pounded in (or even driven in with explosives) like pilings, or a variety of other non-mass means of getting a grip on the bottom. One method of building a mooring is to use three or more temporary anchors laid out with short lengths of chain attached to a swivel, so no matter which direction the vessel moves one or more anchors will be aligned to resist the force.

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An interesting element of anchor jargon is the term under weigh, which describes the anchor when it is hanging on the rode, not on the bottom. Usually an anchor is described as under weigh when it has been broken out of the bottom and is being hauled up to the boat because all the weight of the anchor and rode are lifted. This should not be confused with under way, which describes a vessel which is moving through the water.

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