Other people argue over politics or religion. Sailors argue over anchors.

When I started sailing back in the 1950s, my father taught me that the ultimate in anchors was the CQR. The makers wanted to call it the “Secure”, but the regulators wouldn’t allow a name that could be seen as some sort of guarantee. However “CQR” sounds a bit like “Secure”. So, the “CQR” it became.

It was a revelation to yachtsmen who had only known the Fisherman – a fine anchor in rock or kelp. But it used to drag through sand and mud at the speed of light. The CQR was a “plough” anchor. It used its curved flukes – taken from the design of the agricultural plough, to slow its passage through the substrate. After all, it took a team of draught horses to pull a plough. How much force could a 2 ½ ton yacht exert – and 2 ½ tons was about the size of an typical yacht in those days.

Of course, the 1950s yachtsman didn’t actually trust the CQR to be “secure”. He checked his transits regularly. In a blow, he might sit up in the cockpit with a pipe of Navy Cut and keep an anchor watch. Father always used to lie to a scope of 3:1 by the leadline – never more. And he never added anything for the height of the stemhead above the water (although, in a Folkboat, it wasn’t much.)

When I got my first boat – the little 18ft Caprice, she came with a “plough” (a CQR copy), five fathoms of 1/4in chain and plenty of rope. I never questioned it.

Largo had the same – but 3/8ths. I remember getting up one night off Pottery Pier in Poole and wondering why all the other boats were leaving.

They weren’t. I was going backwards.

By the time Lottie Warren came along in 1992, Simpson Lawrence had invented the first of the “new generation” of anchors – the Delta. You can still see them today on charter yachts: They’re cheap and charter crews aren’t going to anchor anyway. They go to marinas or pick up mooring buoys (at the third attempt).

Serious sailors give an absolutely absurd amount of thought to their anchors. Samsara came with a huge and rusty artefact on the foredeck which might once have been a 35lb CQR but there was so much play in the hinge that the geometry must all have been shot to hell. I bought a 20kg Rocna – but only after watching hours of underwater videos of anchors skidding across the seabed without digging in.

That Rocna served me well – not least in Alderney in a northwesterly gale when the swell hit the harbour wall and shot 60ft in the air.

But I had three problems with the Rocna.

1. It was so big (and the 20kg was one size up on the makers’ recommendation) that I couldn’t get it through the pulpit to bring it on deck when I needed to.

2. It presented so much surface area to the sea when the boat was punching to windward that once going up the North Sea, it jammed solid between the bow roller and the windlass and I had the devil of a job freeing it.

3. It gave me nightmares after I saw a YouTube video of a Rocna failing to reset after a sudden and violent 180° wind shift.

After number 3, I conducted my own test in the Summer Isles off the west coast of Scotland: I deliberately drove over it at about a knot and a half, simulating a wind shift. There was the jolt as it plucked out of the seabed. I waited for the second jolt as it dug in again.

The second jolt never came. I puttered in stately fashion all the way across the anchorage until I was in danger of grounding on the other side – the Rocna dragged merrily all the way.

Now I have a Spade. I dig it in with the engine slow in reverse – gradually stretching out the chain until it’s bar-taught at full revs. The thing about the Spade is that it resets without breaking out. It keeps on digging – just in the opposite direction. Or so I’m told…