Forked Mooring
In bad weather, it can be comforting and outright indispensable to prepare a second ground tackle in case the first one drags or breaks.
If the weather worsens, you can drop your second anchor in the following manner: Motor in the direction of your first anchor until you are almost above it but to one side of it , enough so that once you drop the second anchor, the anchor rodes should fork with an angle of about 60° under load. Snub the second anchor and see if that feels more stable. Both anchors deployed from the bow should ideally share the load, but in reality the load shifts from one anchor to the other. You might consider this technique where the consequences of dragging are particularly dire and you hanker for the extra comfort of having two instead of one. When you do this, however, you gain holding power at the expense of a degree of mobility; two anchors may complicate things if you have to quickly weigh anchors and go. The weighing process is the same as with one anchor, but can take twice as long.
