When we first set out cruising, one question that kept coming up was whether we should carry a second anchor. Weekend sailors easily get away with one, but once you start roaming further afield and staying in places where the holding is questionable, the weather unpredictable, or the seabed downright mischievous, a backup anchor stops being a luxury and becomes part of the safety kit. Our pre-purchase surveyor noted it in his report, and every fellow cruiser we crossed paths with shared the same opinion.

Imagine your primary anchor wedged under a rock ledge, refusing to budge, and the only way out is to cut it loose. You manage that, but now you’re moving on with no anchor at all, exposed and wishing you had a backup ready to drop the moment you need it.

Or, you might be awakened in the middle of the night by that dreaded rattle and the off‑kilter motion that only means one thing: the anchor’s dragging after the wind or current shifted. With no spare ready to drop, you’re left in a tight corner at 03:00 as the breeze picks up, and it’s exactly the moment that makes you reconsider your whole anchoring plan.

So we began the anchor debate. Should the second one be a different style, giving us options for different bottoms, or should it be another of the type we already trust?

Our current primary anchor is a Mantus M1, a rollbar design that’s served us well. On earlier boats, we had Rocna anchors, the original rollbar design, and they never let us down. The idea of choosing a different type was tempting, especially since our bow rollers are so close together that fitting two rollbar anchors side by side would be tricky. That seemed like a good reason to go with another shape. But then again, if the secondary might one day have to step up as the primary, we wanted it to be something we trust completely. And for us, that trust lies with rollbar anchors.

Between Mantus and Rocna, we lean toward Rocna. The Mantus is solid, but it’s made of bolted pieces, while the Rocna is welded in one piece, no nuts or bolts that could work loose. Rocna has just recently released their MKII version, which adds a few thoughtful improvements.

The shank has been refined for better strength; the rollbar is reshaped for easier setting, and the fluke geometry has been tweaked to bite faster and hold harder. These aren’t cosmetic changes; they’re the sort of refinements that matter when you’re dropping the hook in a gusty anchorage and you want to sleep without listening for dragging chain.

We decided on the Rocna MKII (25kg, 55 lbs) as our new anchor and picked one up this morning at the local West Marine store, taking advantage of a solid pre‑Black Friday discount. It’s a heavy beast, sized to match the length and weight of our boat, and it feels every bit as solid as we hoped.

The plan is to disassemble the Mantus and tuck it away in the anchor locker or even the lazarette, ready for emergencies or those rare occasions when two anchors are called for. Down the line we might add a Rocna Vulcan on our second bow roller, which is a different shape and would give us more versatility, but that can wait. For now, we’re happy knowing that our backup (Mantus) is every bit as trustworthy as our new primary (Rocna MKII.) And that means when the wind pipes up at 04:00, we’ll be able to roll over and go back to sleep instead of wondering if the boat is about to drift off toward the rocks. Or so we hope.