If you read Chapman’s Piloting and Seamanship it will tell you that for a boat our size, you need about 8′ of anchor chain and 300′ of nylon rope. Our boat came with just a little more chain than that and a little less rope. The more common practice now is to have a lot more chain or all chain. The old anchor chain was 3/8″ hi-test and was pretty rusty. We opted to go with 275′ of 5/16″ G4 chain. The new chain, although it’s a different size, it does fit the gypsy on our SL555 manual windlass. We upgraded our old 45 lb. CQR anchor to a 55 lb. Rocna Vulcan a few years ago.
Rich came up with a scheme for marking the chain every 25′ with 3′ of paint. It starts off red at 25′, white at 50′ and blue at 75′. Then red-unpainted-red at 100′, white-unpainted-white at 125′, blue-unpainted-blue at 150′, red-white-blue at 175′, blue-white-blue at 200′, white-red-white at 225′, white-red-blue at 250′. The last 10′ from 265′-275′ is painted solid red. We’re pretty sure the paint isn’t going to last, so we’ll have to come up with another way to mark the chain down the road.
Always nice to have all chain especially on our boats, T37’s. I was thinking when i replace my chain of going from 3/8″ to 5/16 for the weight savings, but to also go with 250′ to 300′ so the overall weight difference would be about the same compared to what we have now.. We’d eventually like to get to the PNW sometime and we’ll need every inch of it.