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Heading to the Kimberley for the first time and thinking about the dinghy anchoring set up when going ashore for a few hours in relation to tidal change. Obviously don’t want you dinghy left high and dry on the falling tide nor come back to find its 50m offshore and no way to get it back without a swim on croc waters. So thinking of a continuous loop system to pull the dinghy back out into deeper water with the line to the bow and stern and the line fixed ashore at one end and anchor at the other. Some suggest floating line but seems more problematic with crocs possibly so thinking of a sinking line and would 100m be sufficient for most cases? That means pulling the boat out approx 50m from the landing site.
What do others do and any suggestions from old hands Thanks -
Hi Guys, I’ve got close to what you describe. You are correct – if your tender is too heavy to drag down the beach, you need to go ashore on a rising tide and leave before it drops and lands your tender. The option of anchoring off with the loop system is definitely a better option than swimming with crocs.
I have 100M of 6mm braid. The whole thing is stored in a milk crate so I can take it off the dingy. You will need a small fold up anchor on an approx 6M of braid warp and chain to a swivel pulley. You can’t use the anchor on the tender because you will have to disconnect it from the tender each time you use this system, and the warp on the tender anchor will be too long. I used sinking braid, mainly because another boat might run over a floating rope. Otherwise floating should be OK. Don’t be tempted to use twisted rope such as 3 strand silver or nylon – the main beach lines (loop) will twist around each other, and it’s very hard to pull the twist out when standing on the beach 50M from the tender.
Tie the ends of the 100M beach line to the tender’s fore and aft cleats to keep the ends separated. This helps to stop the beach line twisting together. It’s also easier to prevent twists in the beach line by keeping he beach ends (loop) apart from each other. IE Don’t tie both ropes to the same tree on shore.
See attached rough sketch.
PS. I forgot to mention that I have an approx 120mm diameter foam float running on the anchor warp between the pulley and anchor chain to help keep the pulley near the surface.
Hope this helps, Ross
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Thanks Ross, All good advice. Only reason I was going to use floating line was because I was given a drum of around 120m and didn’t have much use for it. It is 3 strand though so might have to reconsider the tangling of the two shore lines or keep them far enough apart to mitigate the risk. Agree that it might be a prop hazard for other boats but thought in The Kimberley it would be quiet enough not to worry about this aspect. I have a separate danforth type anchor which I will probably use and leave the normal dinghy grapnel anchor attached as you say.
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On my setup, the foam float gets dragged under by the weight of the chain. The float only needs to be big enough to keep the pulley off the bottom. Also, if you leave a little slack in the loop rope between the pulley and the beach, it has the effect of lengthening the anchor rode. Normally we only leave the dinghy for max. 3-4 hours while ashore, and it would be unusual for us to drop the anchor in more than about 4M depth. We mostly use the system with an ebbing tide, so the depth is lessening anyway.
It’s one of those practice makes perfect things. You will soon learnt what you can and cant do. I found out last year that the fold up anchors are useless in a breeze with a 700kg dinghy, and changed to a small danforth style sand anchor.
Cheers Ross
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