It’s vital to have a good and reliable self-steering system on a cruising boat. Two experienced voyagers share their combined 80 years of experience with autopilots and vane-gears.
How smart and expensive an autopilot do we need for offshore shorthanded cruising? Lots of options. Here’s how to make sure we don’t select the wrong one and that we get what we paid for.
We can make a huge difference to comfort, speed, and electrical use by manually adjusting our autopilots.
How to set gain, counter-rudder, and trim to make an offshore passage faster and more comfortable, and save battery, too.
So far in this series we have got deep into the technical weeds of how autopilots work, and how to make them work better. Now let’s look at some simple tips, several of which will help with vane gears too.
Some thoughts on autopilot drive types and reliability.
Lessons learned from a poorly installed autopilot, and how we fixed it.
These days every cruiser seems to fit an autopilot, but what’s the case for a vane gear? Or maybe both.
Do you prefer a windvane or an autopilot for longer passages?
At first glance, autopilots and vane gears cost about the same, but the reality is more complicated, and important to get right.
Self steering windvanes have a reputation of being hard to use. Reading these tips can fix that and make us love our windvane.