Staying put

When setting up the boat, I wanted an electronic anchor alarm. The chart plotter has an alarm but it is too quiet plus it is at other end of the boat – so it would never wake you up. Also it’s current draw is too high. The other option was a hand held GPS with anchor alarm but the alarm is very basic – set by a distance that you judge and enter.

With Anchor – you mark the anchor by hitting a symbol on the app at the point that you drop the anchor (shown as an anchor on the photo). This ensures that any swing is always measured from the anchor. If you forget to mark it when you set the anchor you can shift the little anchor symbol to where you believe the anchor is. It then tracks where the boat wanders and shows it graphically on the screen. It colours different time periods as different coloured tracks. You then set a guard alarm by dragging the circle to the desired distance (red circle on the photo).

The advantage of this is that you can watch the boat for a while and see the maximum swing and then set the guard zone slightly beyond that. You can also set the guard alarm as a sector not a circle. The other big advantage is that the alarm is a very very loud siren…. and it does wake you up. See how it earned its keep. If you connect your iPad to the Internet it will send you an email or dial a iPhone if it drags – though I haven’t tested either of these features. We run it without charts but you can get it to superimpose onto a map or satellite view – though you have to be on the internet to do this. Which is not so practical – it would be great if it could off line charts. We run it on an iPad with a Bad Elf attached as a GPS – as it more accurate than the internal GPS of the iPad.