Thanks. I did do a quick search prior to asking, and ran across some
runaway chain videos, which were impressively violent -- but nobody
actually seemed to be getting hurt; they were all standing clear.
You've filled in the rest of the story.
On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 03:37:58PM +1300, Wyatt Rehder wrote:
If you actually do it, you quickly understand why.
Basically, in our case the anchor itself weighs 1500 lbs. Each link on the
chain is about 25 lbs, and there is 100 feet of chain followed by a lot of
1.5" cable.
It has similar hazards to operating a large lathe, the anchor winch has an
unbelievable amount of torque. So if you are ever caught by anything it
will not even slow down, no matter how much of your body it has ingested.
Even a very small winch has plenty of power to do this. The chain is also a
giant pinch point hazard, and can easily catch clothes or limbs. You also
inevitably have some sort of manual interaction with the operation to get
it to operate correctly.
Spooling out the chain is an extremely violent process, and if you are not
careful and are setting into deep water, it can runaway. Which is where it
has built up so much speed, you can no longer stop it with the brake on the
anchor winch. There are some interesting YouTube videos of this happening.
I know of more than a few people who have died or lost limbs being reeled
into an anchor winch.
To top it all off, you are also operating this in an adverse environment,
and probably are lacking sleep. So it gets easy to make hasty or poor
decisions. The thing ends up getting a lot of abuse, so mechanical issues
are common as well.
On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 1:57 PM Norman Yarvin <yarvin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 10:40:18PM +1300, Wyatt Rehder wrote:
Transferring between vessels at sea, is
almost without exception *the most dangerous operation on a vessel.*
Setting an anchor comes a very close second.
Transferring between vessels indeed seems quite dangerous, but how
does one get hurt when setting an anchor?