Windlass Upgrade

Our beautiful Malo 39 cane with a windlass, but alas, the windlass did not work.  Oh, it pulled up the chain OK, but every third time it snagged on the chain stripper.  It was only later we found out why.  The Swedish Cruising Club has installed 5000 mooring buoys in Sweden.  This is probably more than in the entire US.  No wonder the windlass did not work – nobody at Malo had ever dropped an anchor!

Here is a picture of the box, with the windlass siting on top of it.  It is fabricated out of 3/16 316 stainless steel.

The real issue was an innovative design that mounted the windlass on its side on a vertical surface – the side of the anchor locker, and installed a custom chain stripper.  This would seemingly work, until it self destructed by fouling.  We destroyed several chain strippers, each of heaver steel sent to us by Malo, and each was destroyed.  Malo fixed this problem by mounting the windlass horizontally in the Malo 41.  But how to fix our problem.  We owe the solution to Bob Charleston – who designed a steel box that would mount under the windlass, and allow it to be held horizontally.

Here is the box mounted in the anchor locker.

This was a pretty good solution.  We subsequently mounted the chain roller, supplied by Malo, from the box to the bow.  This gives the unit a very unified construction. 

The windlass power cables had to be extended, to reach into the box.  The box does have weepholes in it.  Their was some concern with corrosion, since the windlass is aluminum and the box is steel. This was solved by making a gasket and sealing it tight with silicon.  The anchoring system now works perfectly at its highest speed.  The solution was two year in the making, though, and cost about $1,000 cash.  Our thanks to Bob Charleston for the idea.

We still needed a way of deploying a secondary anchor.  Mikel Locatel came up with this idea for a bow roller:

This roller – a beautiful piece of custom metalwork by Malo, creates a fairlead for a rope rode to the capstan.  Malo calls it the "American Type".  We raised the windlass in the locker a bit through installation of the box, which gave it a better lead.

Finally, we upsized our anchor from a 44 pound to a 66 pound Bruce.  This is one size bigger then the specification provided by Bruce for our boat size.  We have it on 220 feet of 8 mm chain (5/16" ).

Here is the finished look.  Our secondary is a FX-37 aluminum anchor, with 25 feet of 5/16 chain and 150 feet of 5/8" rope rode.  This rides in the bilge in a stowage bag.  We carry 600" of 5/8" yachtbraid (in two 300′ sections) than can be shackled on in an emergency to extend the rode.