A better way to snub your anchor

Jonathan Neeves has sailed every shape and size of yacht. He now cruises a custom-built Lightwave 38 catamaran in Australia and writes for several magazines

Every skipper who has spent a night at anchor will be familiar with the niggling worry about whether they are truly secure. A jolt or rattle in the small hours is enough to wrench the sleeping sailor from his or her bunk and into the cockpit to reassure themselves all is well. I believe that cruising sailors would all enjoy quieter, comfier and more sleep-filled nights on board if they changed the way they used snubbers when at anchor.

A subjective survey of the average anchorage shows that many boats use no snubber at all, and those that do use a short one of 2m-4m, with almost no-one using anything longer. Multihulls have generally always used snubbers in the form of a bridle, which serves the same purpose as well as helping to quell yawing from side to side.

There is a problem with all of these, however. Virtually all snubbers and bridles are simply too beefy to offer any genuinely useful elasticity, making them somewhat redundant for the purpose they were intended for; that is, to dampen snatching at the anchor and reducing the forces that would break out an anchor and cause it to drag across the seabed or riverbed.