Offshore structures such as jacket platforms have anodes fitted on their steel structural members to prevent corrosion. The anodes are projections on the surface of a tubular structural member and they increase the hydrodynamic forces and hydrodynamic coefficients of the tubular member. The effect of anodes on hydrodynamic forces and coefficients depends on several factors. The industrial practice to account for this effect is to multiply the total hydrodynamic force by a global factor, which may be conservative and uneconomical. The objective of this particular study is to determine the effect of location and orientation of anodes on wave loads and hydrodynamic coefficients of a cylinder, which have not been studied extensively to the authors’ best knowledge. The hydrodynamic forces and coefficients on a bare cylinder and a cylinder fitted with anodes were studied for regular waves of Keulegan-Carpenter (KC) number ranging from 0.42 to 1.91 in this experimental investigation. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.