What an exciting morning. We finally have seen landfall. Kevin thinks he saw the mountains for about 10 minutes this morning from about 55 miles out. He is the only one who saw them and it has been foggy and cloudy on the horizon but we know we are close and only getting closer. , Read More

I tried all day to get the DC motor of the autopilot working properly to no avail. The motor works well when it is running, but it does not start every time. We though initially that the brushes were bad and I tried to clean them up, however the more I play with the, Read More

The new autopilot fix worked great, kind of….  My fix with the Delrin worked really well. The linear drive is directly coupled to the drive pull and there is very little slop in the system, unfortunately you need an electric motor to run the system and that is what failed last night.  Everything was, Read More

The autopilot had a minor failure again last night. Everything was going well and then there was a strange sound so we pulled the ram out. The Allen key we used had popped loose and the key way we had cut had worn with the constant back and forth movement of the ram. This, Read More

Well after the epoxy set and I tested out the motor, cleaned up the fitting and gears and reassembled the autopilot it was time to put it back to the test. Everything seemed to go well and we were motoring in some very calm seas which was a nice Intro for the autopilot which, Read More

Well it happened, our autopilot failed last night at 1:30 am. I was on watch and everything was going well. We were sailing downwind with the Genoa poled out and some main doing 6-8 kts when the autopilot failed. I was not able to move the wheel at all so blew the Genoa sheet, Read More

Not much to report over the past 24 hours. The autopilot had continued to work well and everyone is catching up on sleep. I’m on the midnight to 3am shift now and it was a very penetrating cold last night. It felt as if the fog was actually inside the cockpit enclosure. Every surface, Read More

Another day and another 125 miles. The autopilot has been working very well with no complaints from the crew having our fifth crew member back on board. We had an average afternoon but the winds really started to drop off so I rigged up the pole about 6 pm to stop the sail from, Read More

So we did it, we managed to get the autopilot back together in such a manner that it worked well over the last 24 hours and we are cautiously optimistic we will be ok for the rest of the trip. There is a small electro magnet clutch on the Raymarine / Autohelm ram that, Read More