Smooth Sailing While Installing a Windlass

A third option, and one that quickly grew on me, was to construct a bracket in the anchor locker and mount a windlass entirely belowdecks so that on the exterior, nothing would appear to have been changed. Bill and I concluded that we could fashion a shelf that could be through-bolted to the bulkhead and affixed to the hull using Plexus or a similar adhesive. The trick would be to have the bracket at just the right height so that the chain would lead cleanly from the anchor roller into the locker, where it would then run itself around the vertically oriented gypsy of a horizontal windlass.

When deciding on a windlass, you want to look for one rated to lift roughly four times what your ground tackle weighs. Jackalope carries 100 feet of 5/16-inch galvanized chain and a couple of hundred feet of rode. We guessed that together with a 35-pound CQR anchor, the total would come to about 200 pounds. So we settled on Lewmar's Pro Series 1000, rated for 1,000 pounds of pulling power.