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In the world of boating, anchoring is a necessary but challenging operation for a skipper and crew. The purpose of the anchor is to fix the position of the boat, ordinarily the bow, but sometimes both the bow and stern, either:
Practically, all marine vessels longer than about 19 feet need anchors. Skippers, during their training, learn how to anchor because it is such a fundamental aspect of boating - recreational, passenger, commerical or military. How a crew drops and lays an anchor depends on the current, wind, seabed conditions and water depth, all out of the control of the crew. What the crew can control is the type of anchor, type of chain and rode (chain) length. Clearly, once the vessel is underway the only real factor in the control of the crew is length of released chain. In high winds, strong currents amd/or deep water, the crew must release more chain and know what length is released in real time. Therefore, knowing the length of released chain as the anchor is being released is critical to the safety of the vessel and crew. The device used to raise/lower the anchor is called a "windlass". In these two photos you can see how crew members, YEARS AGO, would use a windlass to pull up an anchor. The anchor chain wraps around the axis of the windlass and raises the anchor chain as the crew members (like a pulley) manually rotate the windlass.
Below you can view a video of how anchors are lowered in today's world - on the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier. You will notice that a set of painted links pass through the chain guide as the anchor is released. A crew member will shout out when a color passes by, have it confirmed by 1-2 additional crew members and recorded. Those links are color coded and spaced a measured distance (e.g. 30 feet) along the full length of the chain. This is how they measure the length of chain released on an aircraft carrier. Multiple crew members check each other during this operation since it is easy to lose count as the chain is released. But in real life, on real yachts, there aren't 3 people whose sole job it is to count and track the painted links. And re-measuring and re-painting the links on a regular basis is no easy task. Because of these issues, there has been no widely practiced method for measuring chain length, in real time, during an anchoring operation.
vAnchorAway has developed an application running on an iPhone or iPad (Android coming soon) that utilizes the built in camera to measure the real time rotation of the windlass as an anchor chain is released or recovered. This patented approach to measuring the anchor chain length uses state of the art MACHINE VISION and ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AI to track the windlass as it rotates. The application computes the released anchor chain length using the diameter of the gypsy (the mechanism around which the chain moves). That diameter is measured by the same AnchorAway application using state of the art AUGMENTED REALITY techniques. The gypsy measurement is done once and is only repeated if the chain, windlass or gypsy are changed. The diameter, along with other vessel details, are stored on AnchorAway's host services and available to other AnchorAway subscribers.
And for the first time ever, a technology exists which can not only measure the released chain length, but the rate at which the chain is being released. Then an alarm can be set should the marine vessel speed exceed the rate of chain released by some predetermined factor. Nothing like this has existed before. And, the information can be transmitted wirelessly to a different "smart" device. In this way the helmsman (helmswoman) can see the length of released chain as they are navigating the vessel from the helm, far from the bow.
