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Looking at the tide and my keel depth I usually look to go as shallow as I can (including my swing) That shortens my swing and keeps me clear of bigger boats.
Last time on the hook, opposing wind and current threatened to wrap our ride around the keel so I dropped a small stern anchor without much scope. That made for a good night's sleep.
ken
Staggered makes sense. That way you can get more boats in.I'm also quite new at this. Also trying to get my head around optimum scope, etc., etc.. Throw in the fact that most places that we set our anchor are COMPLETELY new to us, so we have no idea as to bottom, eventual occupancy on that night, wind patterns at night... I spend most of the evening trying to figure out if I've adequately considered all of the variables.
What we have been doing to keep track of things, is to set a mark at the spot where the anchor touches the bottom, on the chartplotter. I use the measure feature on my chartplotter to estimate the distance from our anchor to our boat, and compare that to the amount of rode that we have paid out, once we have finished setting. And, I also use the radar overlay on the chartplotter to measure and periodically recheck the distance from our boat to our closest neighbors. We moved, significantly, the first very time that we set our anchor in a crowded anchorage, and reset it (successfully) a second time. Lately, we've been successful on our first attempt at setting the anchor so that it doesn't move until we want it to.
As to who and what scope is reasonable or not... Given the conditions and the tides for last Friday; you said in your OP that you set at 6:1 (200'/6 would be about 33 ft. of depth), tide at Bainbridge on Friday was 'low' at about 5 PM at 6.4 ft.. If that was the time that you set, then at the 10 foot 'high' tide at about midnight, you would have had a 5.4:1 scope. And then a scope at low/low tide, at 6 AM, of as much as 7.7:1 with 200 ft. of rode. When would you have needed the maximum scope, and how much, for those conditions? If conditions were mild at the time that you set, and expected to stay that way, would your situation have been OK as it was?
Our most entertaining time, in the last couple of weeks, was in a small bay with about seven boats at anchor (we were number three to arrive), where I saw five different approaches to setting an anchor that night, and an additional six or seven other methods over the next two days. The only thing that was consistent over that time, was that we all seemed to choose a spot to drop our anchors where we were staggered on one side of the bay or the other, rather than all lined up in a single row.
Looking at the tide and my keel depth I usually look to go as shallow as I can (including my swing) That shortens my swing and keeps me clear of bigger boats.
Last time on the hook, opposing wind and current threatened to wrap our ride around the keel so I dropped a small stern anchor without much scope. That made for a good night's sleep.
ken