Fifteenth  day out -Nothing broke!

Well I am happy to report that nothing broke in the last 24 hours!

We had a slower than anticipated run but we are still on track. We were able to sail all night however the wind angles kept shifting and the wind speed has been constantly dropping over the last 12 hours.

It really is amazing how much I took our autopilot for granted. I had read all these accounts of people naming their autopilots or wind vanes because they were such an important part of the crew and other reports of people have hour after hour of autopilot woes and I just didn’t get it. Our autopilot system had been nothing but reliable for as long as we had owned the boat.

When we bought the boat it had an Autohelm setup from Raytheon / Raymarine that we used for a number of years. Two years ago I updated all the electronics on board and put in a new B&G course computer, rudder indicator and gyro compass, however I decided to leave the ram because a) it was still a current Raymarine part and b) it was is stalled in the bowels of the lazarret and c) it seemed to sail the boat well and I felt that some of the older Raytheon stuff was built pretty well.

I’m glad I kept the ram and I like the setup as it does seem to work well for our boat, however I do wish I had bought that used spare to keep on board as it is A LOT more work to hand steer for 8 days on end, but we’ll make it, we always do!

Position update at 1200 local time April 7, 2016:
19 53.884 N
142 02.816W
149 nautical mile noon to noon run
853 nautical miles to destination
4.0 Kt. SOG
293 COG