Abstract: The accurate calculation of the penetration depth of ship anchoring is of vital importance to the safety of pipeline projects passing through anchorage areas and navigation channels below the riverbed. Based on the results of the ship anchoring experiment, we first study the calculation accuracy of various existing anchor penetration depth calculation methods including empirical method, standard method and theoretical formula method. Then, we take Hall anchor as an example, and use the finite element software ANSYS-DYNA to propose a numerical simulation method of anchor penetration depth that can consider multiple factors such as complex layered soils, bottoming horizontal velocity and bottoming angle. The influence of anchor dragging on penetration depth is also studied in this paper through the method of geometric analysis. The calculation results show that the bottoming horizontal velocity, bottoming angle and anchor dragging have influences on penetration depth, and among them, anchor dragging has the most significant effect, the influence of bottoming angle comes the second place, and bottoming horizontal velocity has the least influence. It can be obviously seen that after considering the impacts of the bottoming horizontal velocity, the bottoming angle and the anchor dragging, the calculation results will be more conducive to ensuring the safety of engineering projects.