1 DR. RAY: Yes. 



2 MR. LANE: Presumably, you are not going to dangle an anchor over 



3 the edge of a canyon rim. I would presume not. 



4 DR. COOPER: The concern on the part of the fishermen is much more 



5 in terms of lost area for fishing gear than it is the effect one 12-ton 



6 anchor is going to have on a little piece of the canyon floor. 



7 MR. LANE: Drag the distance. I mean, that was a big issue in 



8 Southern California and dragging of those anchors over significant 



9 distances was a big issue. 



10 DR. RAY: Probably the study we did on Tanner Bank is one of the 



11 few times anybody has ever surveyed anchors. We surveyed seven out of 



12 the eight anchors on Tanner Bank. What happens is a lot different than 



13 what people perceive. 



14 Anchor-handling procedures generally are to take the anchor out by 



15 boat and drop it straight down and then they pull tension on it, unless 



16 you happen to have a really unconsolidated bottom where you get a lot of 



17 drag. They will tend to bite fairly quickly and once they bite, they 



18 tension those things up to a couple hundred thousand pounds tension, and 



19 that sucker doesn't move. 



20 In the last 100 or a 150 feet or so of the chain before the chain 



21 or the cable comes off the bottom, that's the point where it will work 



22 and it will have a small swath, but the rest of that thing absolutely 



23 does not move. The actual zone of messed up bottom is a pretty narrow 



24 path. 



25 We used a submersible out on the west coast to do that, and we ran 



26 a hell of a lot of miles of nothing of video and camera transects along 



27 these, documenting what happened. This was up on a rock reef. This was 



28 on a big reef where a bunch of these chains ran across. There was a lot 



29 impact and damage than people had predicted before, not having studied 



30 the behavior of these chains. 



31 DR. COOPER: These anchors are marked with a surface buoy? 



32 DR. RAY: Yes, they are marked with a surface buoy. When they are 



33 ready to retrieve them, the boat comes up, pulls up the surface buoy, 



34 pulls it straight up and then it is winched in. 



268 



