Anchor choise
I have a 45lb CQR and 300' of 5/16" HT chain. The windlass is a vertical Maxwell 800. I anchor most frequently in mud, but I'm taking-off later in the year and plan to find the whitest sandy bottoms to anchor on.The combination works great but there are two small drawbacks...The shank of the anchor is perhaps a bit too long and will sometimes hit the underside of the roller furler drum as i raise and stow the anchor. I've watched carefully what's going on and I don't think it's damaging anything so I'm going to leave things how they are.The chain sometimes jams in the teeth of the windlass. The cause of the jam is two-fold...First, when I'm raising the anchor the chain piles up in the anchor locker and prevents the chain from exiting the windlass cleanly. Keeping an eye on the situation fixes this problem.Second, I had to install a rotating shackle at the anchor/chain connection to allow the anchor to rotate without twisting the chain. The reason was that if the anchor chain twists at all, if the twist makes it back to the windlass, it jams.Otherwise, the setup works very well!Tony.Wind River (#678)