@ Holdriller and Davidships
As per regs the anchors have to be ready to be dropped at a moments notice. I was once asked what I think of it and said, with bigger ships on a river and straight onto a riverbank I NEVER would drop the anchor. The reason is that when you drop it and it drops in front of the vessel it will be "run over" by the ship and rips holes into the bottom. If it goes much backwards also into center fuel tanks the oel spill is there too, As most ships have anchor chain of 10-12 shots (each shot27.5m) you can calculate where the anchor will be when it is dropped by a vessel like this.
So hanging the anchors like that is for his incident good,,if now the pilot said no or the Kapt or both,, who knows,,but decision per se was in this case good
brgds
capt ted