Rub your body with oil.

Rub your body with oil. Sounds like something a dominatrix would say, right? Well, it's really sailor speak to know how much scope, aka length of chain or rope attached to your anchor, you have out. Mack decided we were going to have 200 feet of chain attached to our massive anchor because he really does not want to drag on the hook. I feel like that's an inevitable panic that we'll have but if we throw 1000 pounds into the water to hold us still, I'm game.

Run your body with oil is a sentence you're supposed to remember so you can remember the order of the colors and thus know then length of chain or rope you have out. Rub is red, your is yellow, body is blue, with is white, and oil is orange. I always end up saying Put oil on your body! or Rub oil on your body! or some other derelict version of the sentence before Mack rolls his eyes and says the real sentence.

I don't know how much chain everyone else puts between colors, but we decided 20 feet would be good. That's easy math -- 20-40-60-80-100 -- and it seems like it'll be a good amount for the depths we think we'll be anchoring in. Kenutu has a 6-foot draft, which means ideally we'd anchor in 20-30 feet of water in a protected area and put out 4:1 scope. Gah, more math, but basically you put out 4 feet of chain for one feet of depth so you can spin around in a circle and have some wiggle room. That'd be about 120 feet of chain. Using the Rub Your Body With Oil method, that'd mean I'd watch for all the colors to go by and stop after red goes out a second time. 

After our 14-second chat to decide on 20 foot increments, we measured out ten feet and laid the chain out in the garage. I decided to do a short section of color at the 10 foot increments so we had it if we needed it. Basically, the side on the left in the pic below is every 20 feet in RYBWO and the side on the right is the midsections of those bigger sections. 

Ultimately the plan is to attach the chain to more rope so we have more scope if we need it and to put something on the end of the whole thing so that it can't all come out of the anchor locker and fall to the bottom of the ocean. See, we're planners.