Hold her off a dock with a kedge anchor

The technique of ‘kedging off’ gives the spare anchor, the kedge anchor, its name. There are two main uses.

If you’re lying alongside a harbour wall with a degree of swell giving the fenders a workout, you can pull yourself off the wall a few feet to make things a lot more comfortable.

If you have run aground on a sandbank, you can dinghy out an anchor to a point in deeper water. Pulling against this, you should be able to winch yourself off. Or, if you’re hard aground at the edge of a river or channel, you can set it it the shallows and run the kedge cable through a block on a halyard and winch the cable to make sure you heel in the right direction – you don’t want to heel down the slope.

Here we’ll look at the first instance. As you’ll see, it does create something of a no-go zone to windward as boats will need to steer well clear of the kedge cable, so it might be worth having a word with the harbourmaster first, to see if you can set your kedge to windward without creating a hazard, or – even better – get moved to a more comfortable berth.

Set a bridle between bow and stern cleats, outside the guardrails

Make a loop in the middle of the bridle and snap a karabiner onto it

Flake the kedge cable into a bucket and take it all into your dinghy

Take the kedge a short distance out and launch it from the dinghy

Bring the bitter end of the kedge cable back to the boat, avoiding the prop

Lead the kedge cable through the karabiner and back to a cockpit winch

Ensure there’s a clean lead to the winch

Simply winch away to set the kedge anchor

Before long you’ll pull the boat away from the dock

If you’re being battered against a leeward harbour wall, you can set a kedge, haul yourself to windward and give the fenders a break