It was a pleasant day in mid-May in the Florida Keys. We were fishing for tarpon with Captain Bruce Stagg on the flats outside of Islamorada, and when things slowed down, Bruce suggested moving to some deep water channels where he would stake out the boat. Instead of cruising the flats looking for fish, we'd wait for some fish to move up the channel to us. How deep was "deep"? About 12 feet.

In our current environment, it's rare that we will fish in water anywhere close to 12 feet in depth. For the most part, we are trolling or drifting over water that may be dozens, if not hundreds of fathoms deep. When we do anchor, our usual depth is something more like 45 - 90 feet. 

One of the things which discourages skiff fishermen from dropping the hook in water this deep is having to retrieve the anchor. If you are set up with a scope of 3:1 (pretty standard in most situations), you might have to haul your rode, anchor and chain close to the length of a football field. That's a lot of work if you don't have a winch.

What are your alternatives? The most obvious one is: don't anchor if you don't have to . Drift fish, using the motor or a sea anchor to slow your pace and get better control. But sometimes you can't drift - like when you're in a crowd, near dangerous shoals or the drift angle or speed is wrong, 

Under these conditions, we will use an anchor. And, after struggling with lifting our 14 lb. Lewmar Delta Fastset with chain from 100 feet a few times, we started looking for a better way to haul the anchor.

We've settled on using an anchor retrieval ring and float. This is a very simple device that can be use to effectively lift almost any weight anchor up almost any distance, and makes hand retrieval of the anchor rode a piece of cake.

This technique has been around for a long time - we first read about it in a Salt Water Sportsman article from the 1970s, but we're sure it's been around much longer than that. It's such a simple and effective technique that we're surprised more people don't use it. Perhaps it is because there are a couple of nuances that can cause trouble if you're not aware of them. Or maybe it's because of the difficulty in storing the float.

In any event, in this article, we will cover the basic concepts of how it works, then discuss some of the things we've learned in Toy Boat 2 that make the system run effectively.