A weed anchorage gives the most convincing false set there is. The boat sits still all evening and drags at three in the morning when the wind shifts.

The boat is anchored correctly at eight in the evening and under-scoped at two in the morning, and nothing changed except the water.

An alarm centred on the boat rather than the anchor gives you a circle offset by the whole length of the rode, and the gap is on the side you are drifting toward.

A windlass that stops near the end of the retrieve is almost never the windlass. It is the chain reaching the top of its own pile.

The difference is not marketing. A concave fluke digs deeper under load where a plow tends to plane, and re-setting after a wind shift is where the gap is widest.

The windlass will pull until something breaks, and what breaks is the windlass or the deck it is bolted to. The boat itself has far more force available and costs nothing.

The chain is rated in tons and the shackle joining it to the anchor costs a few pounds. Every ground tackle system fails at whichever link nobody sized.

A second anchor is the answer to a specific problem, not a general upgrade. Set for the wrong problem, it makes things worse than one anchor would have been.

Boats at anchor move constantly, so the hard part is telling normal movement from a dragging anchor. Two checks separate them within a minute.

Two boats that were comfortably apart at dusk can touch at midnight, because they were never swinging on the same radius.

Two chains marked the same size can have different link pitch. One of them fits your windlass and the other jumps out of it under load.

The most common windlass fault is diagnosed as a tired motor and fixed by replacing a cable. The symptom points at the wrong end of the boat.