Re-routing the anchor chain

Does your boat have an inadequate chain locker, which won’t accept all your chain without having to knock the pile over? If you can manage to fix it, it will come as a wonderful relief every time you weigh anchor, and all the chain mysteriously disappears down the navel pipe.

Here’s what I did to accommodate the 250ft of chain on my 22-ton Down East 45 schooner Britannia, where the chain locker was totally inadequate for the amount of chain required for a 45ft, 22-ton boat.

For years I’d found the size of the anchor locker a nuisance. Every time we weighed anchor – even when only part of the rode had been laid – the chain always piled up in the locker and jammed the windlass. Someone had to then scramble over the forward cabin bunks, open the locker’s equally inadequate little door, then push the pile of wet chain to one side, to allow the remainder to be wound in. Sometimes this had to be done twice and was very tiresome, especially when my wife and I were the only two aboard.

The reason the chain would