How to pull up your boat anchor

There are several documented methods when you want to know how to pull up your boat anchor.

They range from manually pulling your anchor by hand to fully automatic pulling methods with a push of a button.

A lot of people in the 12 to 24 foot boat range will use a manual anchor puller system, like the one pictured below. Now, I use the word manual loosely because, although an anchor puller is a manual device, it uses the power of the boat to activate.

This method, combined with some sort of buoy attached to the anchor puller as shown in the picture below, makes this a very affective anchor line pulling method and is one that should be looked at when considering how to pull up your boat anchor.

I guess if you are a young buck with plenty of backbone, pulling 50, 100 or even 200 foot or more of anchor rope off the bottom, may not be that big of a deal, but for us that are past the young buck years, we need a better solution when we are looking at how to retrieve a boat anchor.

In the places that I typically anchor and fish in, I will have an average of about 150 to 200 foot of anchor line out and I definitely don’t want to pull that anchor line by hand unless I am completely out of other options.

All that being said, there have been a few times in the past, that when I was set to pull up my anchor with my puller system, that I didn’t have a clear path in front of me to have the anchor puller do its job and had to pull the anchor line by hand. When I anchored up, I did not have any boats in front of me at the time, so I had a clear path, but by the time I was ready to pull up my anchor, there were too many boats, so I had to go to plan B, pull by hand.

Below is a video of an anchor puller system that I use when I go to retrieve a boat anchor, hope it helps!