Sea Anchor

A sea anchor is a device, often a large parachute-shaped fabric drogue, streamed from a boat into the water rather than to the seabed, used to slow a vessel's drift and hold its bow into the wind and waves during a storm. Sailors developed sea anchors and similar drogue devices over centuries of maritime practice as a practical response to heavy weather, and the source consulted for this entry names no single inventor or exact origin date for the device, so none is recorded here. Modern sea anchors are commonly made of nylon or other synthetic fabric and are standard safety equipment on many offshore sailing and fishing vessels.