BOAT-COMPARATOR Guide
Anchoring right (and anchorage etiquette): cove manners
Picking your spot, avoiding the seagrass, respecting your cove neighbours: anchoring technique and the unwritten rules that keep everyone happy.
A cove in summer is a temporary co-op with no managing agent: everyone arrives with their boat, their anchor and their speaker. The technique takes ten minutes to learn; the manners are what separate a happy cove from an afternoon of horn blasts.
Technique first
Pick a patch of sand (pale) over the seagrass (dark): the anchor sets better, and posidonia — protected and vital — takes decades to regrow; fines rain down from the Balearics to Porquerolles. Pay out 3 to 5 times the depth in chain, let the boat settle back, check the set against a shore transit. In doubt: lift and do it again — nobody ever regretted re-anchoring.
The swinging circle: the golden rule
An anchored boat swings around its anchor. Yours must be able to swing without crossing your neighbour's circle — the first cause of contact when the evening breeze shifts. First come, first served: the newcomer adapts, and dropping 'just ahead' of an anchored boat's hook is the surest way to make loud enemies.
The unwritten etiquette
Music at conversation level (sound carries astonishingly over water), no tender at full throttle among swimmers, reduced speed from the cove entrance (your wake shakes every saloon), and your drone over your own boat, not the others. Come evening: anchor light on, and quiet after 11 pm — coves turn in early.
Leaving cleanly
Motor up over the anchor (the windlass is not a tow winch), rinse the chain if it comes up muddy, and take everything with you — the bin bag left 'just for a minute' on the beach ends up in the water. The cove you leave should be the one you found: that is the whole etiquette, in one line.