It's very right that boats are very different, and so are the boaters and the boating situations. It got so obvious for me on some boating forum, where people were arguing if a small 12V vacuum cleaner would be good enough or not, some (including me) claiming that a 12V vacuum cleaner was just perfect, others claiming that it "did nothing" and that one really needs an ordinary powerful 220V vacuum cleaner on board the boat. At the same time I upgraded ... and immediately became aware of the truth: in a "small" boat (i.e. a 25 feet sail boat) with carpets on the floors, a small 12V vacuum cleaner can be very useful. In a "big" boat (i.e. 43 feet sail boat) with varnished wooden floors, a small 12V vacuum cleaner is pretty useless.

The same goes with anchors and anchor rodes.

Peter Smith has said that the catenary dampening effect of kellets or heavy chain is pretty useless, and that it's better to put the weight in the anchor.

He may of course be right about this when it comes to anchoring in adverse conditions - but most leisure boaters would never consider anything else in such conditions than being in a sheltered man-made harbor, with the boat attached to land by several ropes.

Chain, rope or a combination? Think of the handling first - putting more than some 10-15 kg of chain in the water is not much good without an anchor winch - but when one has a winch (and enough batteries to drive it), probably the best is to use only chain (but have a long spare rope available for the rare occation that one needs to do deep water anchoring, or anchoring with a really long rode).