6/10/15
Southport NC
Posted by Bill
We are back in Southport mode after spending the week with family at the beach. No more spacious living conditions, with a flushing commode, ice and water in the door of the refrigerator, etc..etc…etc… You fellow live-a-boards know what I’m talking about. We are also back to boat maintenance, and the project of the day is cleaning out the anchor locker.
We have 2 anchors on the bow of our boat with a locker for each one. Actually, it is one locker with a big divider in the middle which does a great job of keeping the chain and rope for each anchor separate. We have a wash down pump and hose at the deck that allows me to wash the chain as the anchor is raised, but to be honest, it is hard to get all of the muck off of the chain, especially when anchoring in the ICW (aka…rivers). Island Packet (the type of boat we have) makes a great yacht, but one of the things I don’t like about the design is that the anchor locker drains into the bilge of the boat. This means that the muck left on the anchor chain eventually ends up in the bilge, and in the case of river mud, will eventually stink the boat up as the associated marine life breaks down. Then the bilge has to be cleaned out and treated to kill the crap that is decaying.
The primary anchor was used everywhere but the Bahamas. It is a Delta Quick Set plow anchor and does not do well on sea beds like the Bahamas. In the Bahamas we used our Bruce anchor, claw type, which was easier to clean as the Bahamas is mostly sand bottom. So we set out to clean the primary anchor locker first. We pulled the 180 feet of chain and 120 feet of rope out onto the dock and cleaned it good with fresh water. Then we attacked the locker. The pictures are not the best but this is what we saw in the bottom…a couple of inches of nasty muck!
We scooped it out into a bucket:
And then hosed it out. Then all of the chain and rope went back in after it dried out. No wonder we had a stinky bilge!
We will attack the other locker after the weekenders leave this weekend.