STICKING POINTS - Anchoring alternatives, and why you will always need a traditional anchor.

My brother-in-law likes to fish offshore reefs, and the process once entailed navigating to a mark, dropping a float, and idling upwind or up-current to drop the anchor in hopes the set would drop us back to the float.

- Peter McDonald

This laborious process sometimes took three to four tries to set the anchor just right to put us on top of the structure holding fish. Then my brother-in-law installed a bow-mount Minn Kota electric trolling motor with a virtual anchoring feature called Spot-Lock. Now we simply idle over the chart-plotter mark until the fishy structure shows up on the finder, deploy the Minn Kota, and hit the Spot-Lock button. The GPSguided motor does the rest, moving and twisting to keep us right over the spot.

One of the joys of 21st-century boating is how many old-school anchoring problems have been solved by new-school technology. Here's a look at some of the available anchoring alternatives, how they work, and why you should still have a properly scoped anchor at the ready.