UNDERWAY25cruisingworld.comI
magine your boat entering
the calm, turquoise water of
a lagoon. Outside, the swells
you just sailed through explode
on the fringing coral reef. In this
cruising paradise — typical in the
tropical Pacifi c and Indian oceans
— the water is so clear that at 20,
40 and even 60 feet deep, the bot-
tom holds no secrets. At the an-
chorage, this transparency reveals
a mostly white-sand bottom inter-
rupted by stand-alone coral struc-
tures, called bommies, that rise like
cactuses from a desert fl oor.
Yikes! Ranging in size from a
basketball to a minivan, these bom-
mies can abrade the galvanizing of
your chain. They can foul your an-
chor. After just a bit of swinging,
your rode can wrap bommies until
your scope is eff ectively reduced
to 1-to-1 (which can then pit ex-
treme forces against your snubber
and deck hardware in the event
of storm-induced swell). Yet de-
spite these threats, when anchored
cruising boats and bommies tango,
it’s most often the bommies thatendure the most damage.
Even when merely brushed
across coral, anchor chain causes
damage that is either irreparable
or very slow to heal. Bommies of-
ten grow up and out from a narrow
base of rocklike exoskeleton. Juve-
nile bommies can be broken and
toppled fairly easily by an anchor
chain drawn tight across them.
Fortunately, there is a time-
tested anchoring technique that
greatly reduces the chances of
snagging a fragile bommie. It’s a
technique we learned and became
skilled at in the atolls of French
Polynesia and the Cook Islands.
After locating the largest clear
patch of sand we could, we’d attach
a fender to our chain (by tying a
hitch) every 25 feet as we deployed
the anchor. (Our chain is^3 ⁄ 8 -inch
diameter, and we use Polyform F5
and G5 fenders.) The eff ect is that
our rode hangs suspended above
the tops of the bommies, prevent-
ing damage to our chain, our boat
and these slow-growing organisms.
— Michael RobertsonANCHORING
AMONG CORAL
TIM BARKER