In 2019 Richard Macfarlane, a boatbuilder, designer and mechanical engineer, had a chat with me about the perennial question of whether all-chain or rope-and-chain was the better anchoring system. This resulted in us agreeing that we couldn’t find accurate information on the loads exerted on an anchor rode and that we needed to do something about the data gap. We decided to conduct some full scale trials, with Richard building the load cell and me providing the boat and conducting the data analysis. The results are in the two reports below. Spoiler alert: the anchor loads are very much lower than the figures you find in anchoring guides. This led us to re-consider the fundamentals of anchoring, described at the page Anchors and anchoring.