Anchoring your boat

[peterbj7]

You anchor at a reef dive site here in Belize and you'll end up in court! Either you use existing fixed moorings or you have a captain on board and the divers do a drifting entry. It isn't clear whether it's illegal to leave a boat unattended, but what is clear is that you are 100% responsible for the boat and anything it might affect. I can think of several people who have tied up their boat to a fixed mooring and returned at the end of the dive to find it gone. Either it became untied, or the fixed mooring broke (rare but does happen), or it was rolled over by a freak wave and sank (that has happened to several people I know).

You leave your boat unattended at your own great risk.

 

[scubaskipper]

More is better, if it can break, it will and leave a qualified person on station are your best pieces of advice. The longer you're around boats the more this will become very evident.

 

[captain]

We see alot of commercial boats employing this technique but they never pull it all the way in. They just drag the anchor behind the boat until they are at the next reef rise they want to fish, pull alittle past it into the current and uncleat the anchor... good to go! Of course this is only for moving a short distance and not a long long way from one spot to the next.

Yep, that was what the charter captain that I learned it from did.

 

[peterbj7]

We see alot of commercial boats employing this technique but they never pull it all the way in. They just drag the anchor behind the boat until they are at the next reef rise they want to fish, pull alittle past it into the current and uncleat the anchor... good to go! Of course this is only for moving a short distance and not a long long way from one spot to the next.

But not suitable if there's anything down there that could be damaged by a dragging anchor. It isn't a practice I'm familiar with either in Belize or in the UK.

 

[captain]

But not suitable if there's anything down there that could be damaged by a dragging anchor. It isn't a practice I'm familiar with either in Belize or in the UK.

The anchor isn't "down there" it is skipping along on the surface.

 

[peterbj7]

OK, I misread it!