Time spent at a sheltered anchorage can reduce underway hours on watch by what percentage?

• A. 50%
• B. 25%
• C. 75%
• D. 100%

Answer: (A)

When a vessel is not moving, the amount of watch time needed on deck drops because there’s less navigation, traffic, and risk to monitor. Spending a significant portion of time in a sheltered anchorage reduces the hours requiring an underway watch. In typical practice, about half the day can be spent at anchor without needing underway watch, so the hours that would normally require a watch while the ship is moving are cut in half. For a 24-hour period, if the ship is anchored for 12 hours and underway for the other 12, underway watch hours are reduced by 50%. The reduction scales with how much time is spent at anchor: more anchoring means more reduction, up to the limit of the anchored fraction. The other percentages would only apply if a different fraction of time were spent anchored.