Goodbye, Anchor!

LISTEN: (5 minutes, 26 seconds)

WE BOAT ANGLERS love to hate anchors. They clang and bang, making a fish-spooking racket. They chip fiberglass and ding aluminum. Hauling them up is a pain in the keister and when they come up covered in mud it creates yet more cleaning chores. Too bad we can’t do without them… or, can we?

Fair warning: if you already have a bow-mount trolling motor with Spot-Lock on your boat, you’re about to be a little bored. Or, maybe feel a little vindicated. Either way, being able to drop down the trolling motor, click a button, and hover in place isn’t merely advantageous, it will literally change the way you fish. Anchor-free anchoring becomes a snap and moving that “anchor” to reposition your boat in tiny increments — allowing you to systematically work over a wreck or reef without spooking any fish nor throwing your back out — will help you boost your catch rate. Same goes for being able to hold the boat in an ideal casting position, creep stealthily through the shallows, and set an autopilot to ease you slowly through an area you’d like to prospect.

A few years back those of us with boats in the 28 to 35-foot class would have shrugged at the thought of having a trolling motor and Spot-Lock. The offerings on the market simply couldn’t do the job. Today, however, several manufacturers offer shaft lengths up to and even over 100 inches, which can easily keep the prop in the water from a bow elevation of well over three feet, even in three-foot seas. The motors themselves have enough power to do this in a 20-knot wind or a roaring current, and if they’re hitched to one of the new LiFePO4 batteries, they’ll do it from sunrise to sunset.

Sure, those lithium batteries do add a significant amount of cost. (Plan on spending at least a grand, maybe more depending on just how much juice you need). Same goes for the motor itself (to the tune of several thousand dollars, and the cost can get all the way up to $5K or more to get a big-boat rig and have it professionally installed). But cost is just about the only downside to having one of these setups, assuming you have a boat on which a bow-mount can be utilized without significant customization. 

Even bigger offshore-oriented boats can enjoy anchor-free anchoring, too. Both Yamaha and Mercury offer GPS-enabled virtual anchoring as one of the many functions in their joystick systems, and other manufacturers have plug-and-play options via Optimus 360 from Dometic. These hold the stern into the seas as opposed to the bow, and some systems do have issues with a lot of abrupt clunking into and out of gear or revving hard. Still, these are nitpicks compared to having to drop and haul an anchor over and over again. Note, however, that these systems can add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of a boat; just how heavy the lift will be depends on the make of the system and how many outboards your boat has.

Then there are pole anchors to consider. With a trolling motor at the bow, they may be redundant in some scenarios, but these will hold you in position in the shallows just as long as you’d like without depending on battery power or spinning a prop. Though their application is much more limited, it’s still a heck of a lot easier to use one than it is to wrestle with a Danforth.

All of the above notwithstanding, a wise boater will not leave the slip or ramp without an anchor aboard. Even with multiple systems like these you do still need to haul it around because you never know when mechanical or electrical failure will occur, and being able to drop the hook is a matter of safety. It’s critical to be able to hold your boat’s position in certain situations, and the less tech you depend on to do so, the better. If you’ve ever been on a boat that had lost power and was drifting towards a line of inlet rocks, no doubt you were grateful to have that low-tech chunk of steel to lower down and stop your progress. So, although on many modern boats the anchor gets stowed in a locker and rarely sees the light of day, you still do need to carry one.

On my boat, I found it unacceptably annoying that the anchor rattled a bit in the locker’s rack in any significant seas. Planning to never use it, I had the brainstorm to duct tape the flukes to the shaft so it wouldn’t rattle anymore. This did the trick. And just a few months later, I discovered the hard way that the GCFI outlet at my slip in the marina had gone bad — plugging in the onboard charger had been doing nothing for several weeks, at least. I found out when (you guessed it) I dropped down the trolling motor, hit the power button, and nothing happened. More than a little annoyed, I grabbed a bait knife, cut away the duct tape, and dragged that infernal anchor out of its dungeon. Much as I hated to do this, I certainly was glad I had the anchor aboard.

It’s been well over a year since then, and now I check the charger’s light every time I plug it in. After re-taping the anchor, I haven’t had to use it since. And in all honesty I hope I never have to again. With a little luck, I never will — but it will remain aboard, no matter what.

Email Lenny Rudow at ContactUs@fishgame.com

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