Setting up an anchor for a Florida Keys skiff, a bay boat, and an offshore boat is a How 2 Tuesday breakdown of the anchor, chain, and line system that actually holds under tarpon, wind, and tide, and lets you bail off the anchor fast when a fish takes off running. The core rule: use about as much chain as your boat is long, then match the anchor style to the bottom you fish.
Press play in the player above to hear the full How 2 Tuesday breakdown, or scroll back up to watch.
A simple rule of thumb is to use roughly as much chain as your boat is long. A 17-foot skiff typically carries 12 to 17 feet of chain, a 24-foot bay boat around 20 to 25 feet, and a 36-foot offshore boat 30 to 36 feet. More chain lets you get away with a lighter anchor, because the chain lies along the bottom and helps the anchor dig in.
A plow-style anchor, sometimes called a Bruce anchor, is the go-to for turtle grass bottoms common in the Keys backcountry. For sand or mud, a Danforth-style fluke anchor holds well. Over rocky bottom, a rock anchor built like a grappling hook is the better choice, and most serious anglers carry two anchor styles so they can swap depending on where they end up.
Attach the chain to the bottom of the anchor with hardware, then loosely secure the top eye with tie wraps or monofilament instead of a solid shackle. If the anchor gets fouled on the bottom, pulling hard snaps that light connection and lets the anchor pull free backward, the same direction it went in, much like backing a fish hook out the way it came in instead of ripping it forward.
On a skiff, a manageable 40 to 60 foot line with a clip on the end lets you attach a floating poly ball, untie the cleat, and leave the ball bobbing on the surface while you chase a running tarpon. A bay boat calls for a longer utility line, often 80 to 100 feet, sized around twice the depth of the water you anchor in most. An offshore boat needs several spliced sections, sometimes 100 feet layered on 100 feet, so plenty of scope can go out in deep water without one impossibly long, tangled line.
Always the bow. Anchoring from the stern of a small boat under a strong tide is one of the fastest ways to sink it, because the current can pull the transom under before you know what happened. Keep a knife within reach on every boat so you can cut the line free in an emergency instead of fighting the current to retrieve the anchor.
I fish three different boats regularly, a 17-foot skiff, a 24-foot bay boat, and a 36-foot offshore boat, and each one anchors differently enough that I get asked about it constantly. The one thing that holds true across all three: when I put the anchor down, I want it to hold, and I want to be able to get off it fast if we hook something that wants to run.
In the skiff, I am anchoring in shallow channels too deep for the push pole or the power poles, often right on top of a tarpon school. It is usually a one-shot deal. If the boat slides through the fish, the shot is over. That is why the anchor has to stick the first time, and why the line has to be short enough to manage and clipped to a poly ball you can throw overboard the instant a fish eats. The full breakdown of chain length, anchor weight, and the exact line setup is worth hearing in my own words in the episode.
For more How 2 Tuesday breakdowns, scroll back up to watch the full episode.
The bay boat and the 36 offshore need more chain, more anchor options, and longer, spliced anchor line so you can hand out serious scope in deeper water without a single unmanageable coil. I get into why the line needs to be sectioned instead of one long length, how an anchor ball retriever pulls the whole rig back up for you, and why a bigger poly ball matters once you are anchored in a couple hundred feet of water on a big tide.
Once I started actually breaking down anchoring for this show, I realized there is a lot more to it than most people think, different anchors, different chain, different line lengths, all built around the bottom you fish and what you are trying to catch.
Get the basics from this episode, then press play above for the details on picking the right anchor for your own boat and water.
Tom Rowland
This How 2 Tuesday segment of the Tom Rowland Podcast is part of the show's recurring how-to series, where Tom breaks down practical boating and fishing skills, in this case anchor setup, for the skiffs, bay boats, and offshore boats he fishes out of the Florida Keys.
EP 46 | How to Set Up Your Anchor For Any Type Of Boat
Hey, everybody. Welcome to How To Tuesday today. We're gonna talk about anchors today. We're gonna talk about how to get your anchor set up for pretty much any boat that you're gonna fish out of. Personally, I fish out of three boats. I fish out of a 17 Yellowfin skiff, your typical kind of flats boat type boat, 17 feet lightweight. We do need to anchor that occasionally. I'll also fish out of the 24 bay boat, Yellowfin 24, which is similar to any style kinda bay boat in that size range, and then 36 Yellowfin, offshore.
So the three boats obviously have different anchoring requirements, different types of bottom, different lengths of line, different amounts of chain that you have to have, and even different types of anchors. The one thing that holds true in any of these boats is that when I put my anchor down, I want it to hold. I don't want it to slip. When I put my anchor down, I also want to be able to get off of the anchor and go chase down a fish in the event that we actually go out there and catch the fish we're after, a tarpon or a sailfish or some big running fish that requires you to get off the anchor and go chase that fish down. You wanna be able to do that quickly.
Alright. So here's the recipe. Whether it's the skiff, the bay boat, or the offshore boat, what you wanna do is you wanna have an anchor rode chain that has a length of line on it that is your utility line. That first length of line is going to be about where you generally anchor. So in the skiff, I'm anchoring in shallow channels. It's too deep for the push pole. It's too deep for the power poles. And if I find myself in that situation where I'm up tight of some tarpon, I want to be able to drop an anchor. It's a very light boat. Usually don't need a real heavy anchor, but when I put it down, I want it to stick, because oftentimes it's a one shot deal, and if I start sliding through that school of tarpon, it's over.
So one rule of thumb is that I'm gonna use about as much chain as the boat is long. So a 17 foot boat, I might use anywhere from 12 to 17 feet of chain. With more chain, you're gonna be able to get away with a little bit lighter anchor. But if you really like to stay put, use the regular anchor, use a little bit more chain than some other people might use, and when it goes down, it's gonna stay there.
I like, for the skiff, I like to use what I call a Bruce anchor. It's a kind of a plow style anchor, and that's going to hold me very well in the turtle grass, which is kind of the bottom where I'm gonna anchor for the most part. You might hit a rocky bottom, but a heavy anchor with a lot of chain on a small boat is gonna hold you there. So I'm gonna use that small anchor. It's usually around eight to ten pounds, about 15 feet of chain, and then my line.
This is the crucial part. The anchor line that I'm using, I want that to not be super long. I want it to be manageable, because I want to be able to get off of it. I wanna have an anchor ball, a floating poly ball that I carry in all the boats, and I wanna be able to untie the anchor and leave that ball right there and go and fight the fish. So if I'm anchoring in about 20 feet at the deepest, for the most part, I'm gonna want about twice that length of line, plus a little bit more. So I'm gonna have an anchor line that's 50 to 60 feet, and it's gonna have a clip on the end.
Then what I can do with that is I can clip my anchor ball onto the end, and in the event that we actually do catch the tarpon and it takes off running, we have to go chase after it, which is the case at the bridges a lot of times, I can have this anchor line off the boat and out very, very quickly. Now 60 feet is a little more than I might like. I might like it more like 40. If you're fishing the same kind of spots all the time, you're gonna know what that length of line is. If you've got to mess with a whole bunch of line to get it out of the boat, you basically wanna untie the cleat and throw the ball, and now you're floating away from the anchor line.
Now in the bay boat, it's a little bigger, a little heavier. We're gonna anchor in some different situations. We're gonna certainly anchor in those same channels. We're also gonna anchor nearshore, spots that we have, and may find ourselves offshore. So what I wanna do there is I want to have the same type of anchor, the plow style anchor, with about 20 to 25 feet of chain, about the length of the boat. And then I'm gonna have my utility line. My anchor line is going to be twice as deep as the water that I'm planning on anchoring in very often. So let's say I'm anchoring those 20 foot channels. I'm also anchoring in 40 feet of water offshore. So let's just say I had an anchor line that was anywhere between 80 and 100 feet, and it's gonna have a clip on the end.
And then, of course, I'm gonna find myself anchoring in deeper water. I'm gonna find myself needing to have more scope. I'm gonna find myself wanting to use my anchor line to get back to some tarpon that are a little further down the channel. So I'm gonna have another line in my hatch that's gonna be a hundred feet or two hundred feet, and then probably another line under that that's another hundred feet. So what this does is, if I have a thousand feet of anchor line in my boat and I hook a tarpon, I've gotta either pull the anchor, which you don't wanna do, or I'm gonna have to get all that anchor line out of the boat.
So you want this in sections, and you want it in sections where it's not knotted. You want it spliced so that you have a smooth connection. And that comes into play when you start using the anchor ball retriever. It's a ring that has one of these poly balls on a little small piece of line, and you put that over the anchor line. You drive up the anchor line, and it actually pulls the anchor up to the surface for you, and then you just pull in all the line. It's a very good way to retrieve your anchor with a lot of line out. It makes it much easier.
So the same thing holds true on the 36. We're gonna want about 30 to 36 feet of chain. We're gonna have several different types of anchors that we can use, a Danforth kind of fluke style anchor. You got a rock anchor, and you also have this plow style anchor. All of them work well for different types of bottom. So depending on the type of bottom you wanna have, most fishermen that I know have two styles of anchor in their boat. They have a rock anchor, and they have the plow style anchor or the Danforth style anchor.
This can be interchanged. You can change them out. So if you find yourself getting ready to anchor over a rocky area, you put the rock anchor on, which is like a grappling hook. Then you have these other anchors, and they may hold, but some will hold much better than others. The grappling hook, you can get away with a very light grappling hook with a lot of chain.
The plow style anchor for me still is my favorite, and you wanna make sure that these anchors are attached the way that they should be. For most anchors, you can attach the chain right to the top or you can attach it to the bottom, and then there's another place that looks like it should attach at the top. But that's for a quick release. You either use tie wraps or monofilament or strong nylon string, and you tie this up. So what happens is it's a breakaway, so that when you get your anchor stuck as you're pulling, you break that away, and then you end up pulling the anchor from the bottom straight out the way it came in, just like the way you get a fish hook out of your finger. If you get a fish hook in there, you wanna pull it out the same direction that it came in. Somebody got really smart a while back and made this breakaway anchor system, so the anchor is attached at the very bottom with some hardware, and then it's just loosely attached at the top with tie wraps or monofilament. That's definitely the way you wanna go.
Man, once I start doing this anchor show, it seems like there's a lot more to anchoring than I originally thought, because there's a lot of different kinds of anchors, a lot of different kinds of chain, a lot of different kinds of line and links, and a lot of different types of situations that you get in that require more anchor, more line, more chain, or a different type of anchor. So we'll go down this road again, but just for today's purposes, let's think about you need to come up with a style of anchor that is the best for your area, and that may not be a single anchor. You might have to carry a rock anchor and a plow style anchor. Then you're gonna want chain roughly the length of the boat. You're gonna be safe, you're gonna be like me. When you put that anchor down, that thing generally stays. I don't mind pulling a little heavier anchor if it means that when I put that down, I rarely slip. And then the lines that you choose, you're gonna want a manageable length of line that you can clip onto a longer length of line that can then clip onto an even longer length of line, and that is a very effective way to do it.
The other thing you'll need is one of the poly balls, and depending on where you are anchoring, how strong the current is, how much scope you have, depends on how big that poly ball needs to be. On the 36, you obviously have more room to keep a big ball, so you might as well have one, because when you get out there on a full moon tide anchored in 250 feet of water and the tide is really ripping, it can pull that poly ball completely underwater, and you're not gonna be able to find your anchor until slack tide. So you don't want that to happen. On the skiff, just a small poly ball probably works just fine, and on the bay boat, somewhere kind of in the middle. You are somewhat restricted by the hatch design, the hatch size, the hatch configuration to where you're only gonna be able to carry a ball of a certain size. Now to get away from that a little bit, you can deflate your poly ball a little bit and maybe fit it into a hatch that it might not go into if it was fully inflated.
So anchoring tips, I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of questions on the anchoring. For you skiff fishermen, if you are thinking about anchoring for tarpon, you're a skiff fisherman, a kayak fisherman, some sort of small boat fisherman, don't anchor from the stern. That is tempting, but man, under big tides, you anchor from the stern, and that anchor actually hits, with the anchors that we're talking about, that thing's not going anywhere, and it will pull your stern straight underwater and sink your boat. So you can easily sink a boat with an anchor, and that is one way to do it. So don't do that. If you anchor from the bow, you're in much better position, but you always want to be ready in a small boat, that if all of a sudden you anchor in a situation and the wind is blowing so hard, and something happens that you don't expect, you're not gonna be able to pull that anchor up. So you also wanna have a way that you can cut it free. Have a utility knife, a fillet knife somewhere to where you can cut that thing free, because believe me, you're not pulling your boat against that current on a flat transom enough to back up the anchor line to pull it out of the deal. It can sink you so fast that it's kinda scary. So definitely always have a knife, but just don't make that mistake to begin with.
Alright, so we've covered the anchor, the anchor ball, anchor chain, and the different types of anchors, and even going into strategies on anchoring a little bit. I hope that's good for today. I'm sure we're gonna go into this in much more detail on how to anchor in the skiff to attack these tarpon that are in a channel, how to anchor at the bridge so that you find yourself in the bridge span that you wanna be in, and of course offshore, this is a big challenge, how to anchor in 250 feet of water and land on the wreck. So those are shows that can come up if we have enough questions about them. I'd be happy to go into that. But How To Tuesday today, how to anchor your boat, how to pick an anchor, how to get it set up, and make sure that you can also get it out and throw it or pull off of the anchor line and go chase that fish that you're there for. So good luck. We'll see you next week on How To Tuesday.
Subscribe to get the latest episodes, show notes, and exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox.