As anyone who has ever had an anchor stuck will know, it can be a very difficult situation to be in. Getting free is easy enough. All it takes is a sharp knife to cut the rope. That however is a last thing you want to be doing. If you have lots of rope, you could of course try motoring around in a huge circle pulling at different angles in an attempt to dislodge it. Success or failure can be affected by the type of ground being fished and the type of anchor being used.

It really is a last resort when have to cut the rope, and with the cost of setting up again, a very tough decision to take. I have only ever had it happen to me twice. On the first occasion I buoyed the rope, but was still unable to free it later. The second occasion was filled with irony. I was fishing a wreck when a couple of diving boats arrived on the scene. You can imagine the comments. So we decided on a move to a different wreck only to discover the anchor was stuck. We then had to grovel cap in hand to the divers who very kindly freed it for us.

Determined never to get into that situation ever again, I decided to experiment with tripping my two anchors. One was a bruce anchor with holes drilled in the appropriate places to facilitate this. The other was a fisherman anchor with a single hole at the top to connect the chain. To get around this a shackle on the end of the chain was to fixed to the bottom of the anchor, with a thin piece of rope through it lashed around the main stem of the anchor to hold it in place. The chain was then fixed and tripped as detailed below.

PHOTO 1 (Fisherman anchor rigged to trip): As explained above, the fisherman anchor is not designed to be tripped, but can be tripped very successfully as is shown here.

PHOTO 2 (Chain fixed to bottom of anchor): Most anchor patterns have a hole at both ends of the main stem. Using a shackle, first connect the end of the chain to the lower of the two holes.

PHOTO 3 (Chain laid along main stem of anchor): Next job is to lay the chain along the length of the main stem and fix it to the upper hole.

PHOTO 4 (Trip in position): This upper hole fixing is the trip. How you fix this depends on you. I have seen all sorts of ideas used including wire and several wraps of heaving monofilament. Both of these work to a point. But what you really want is something that will hold the chain in position without breaking unnecessarily, then break on demand when it needs to. The best thing I have come up with so far has been plastic cable ties. So successful are these that I had to deliberately break the link to get the final picture in this sequence.

PHOTO 5 (Rope wrapped around bow post): Should the anchor become stuck, you need to motor up tide in the opposite direction to which the boat was lying when at anchor. To get sufficient pull on the rope to crack the cable ties it is best to pull the rope with the boat rather than by hand. For safety reasons a rope is always best pulled when wrapped around the bow post. That way if the anchor stays snagged after the cable ties break, the bow will be pulled around and you can cut the outboard. Pulling from the stern risks having the back end dip down if the anchor won't come, which in a heavy sea could be dangerous.

PHOTO 6 (Holding tripped anchor): The idea is that the cable ties break allowing the trapped anchor to be pulled clear in reverse. A case of "You are the weakest link", but for once it isn't "Goodbye".