of a story. A friend of mine who was and still is a very capable cruiser was crossing the bight between Isla Cedros and the mainland on his way up the outside of Baja. If you have ever crossed that spot I would wager a bet that you had a rough passage. So it was for my friend. He departed the Northwest Anchorage late at night after the wind had started to drop off. This is the standard. You leave after the wind drops but as soon as you can because you have to beat the winds that will come up hard in the afternoon on the mainland. Usually you start out (at least I do) with a double reef and shake it out a couple of hours after leaving the island because of the "point effect". On this night the wind never dropped as forecast. The seas got worse along with the wind and he just pounded into it all night. He told me that he just couldn't make any headway and his SOG was down by half. The boats motion didn't feel any different because he was getting the hell knocked out of him all night long anyway so he just kept punching into it. When the sun came up the wind finely dropped off and he went forward for his walk around and discovered, you guessed it, his anchor was completely deployed. Right in front of him, all 300 feet of it hanging off the bow. He went back and turned on the windless and tried to retrieve it but the breaker popped in just a few seconds. He tried to manually crank it up but the windless has a poorly designed manual backup so that didn't work. He tried a block and tackle but the damage to the deck and time required was not worth it to him so, again you guessed it, he cut the chain with a hacksaw and dumped his entire 300 feet of 3/8 chain and his 45 pound Burce anchor. He felt so bad and he was almost so embarrassed that he couldn't talk about it but, you know, shit happens. Even to the best of us. A couple of thousand dollars put everything right and he's still cruising Mexico. His story makes a pretty good case for spending the time and securing your anchor.