It was definitely time to leave San Francisco. We spent the last couple of weeks in Brisbane where we finished up numerous projects that we wanted done before heading south. One of the more notable was the autopilot. Some find it a little amazing that we came up the coast from San Diego without one and that we have been sailing Mahdee for over a year and still haven´t got it hooked up. That wasn´t the plan.
Ideally we were going to set up the autopilot in San Diego before heading north in February. Realistically that wasn´t possible since we didn´t have all the parts. Plan ¨b¨ was to get the auto pilot all together while we were in Newport Beach. That might have happened and I did install most of the parts, but we couldn´t get a couple key parts before we ran out of allowable time in the harbor. Wood Freeman fedexed the last pieces which arrived on May 15, our last allowed day in the harbor.
Plan ¨c¨ was to go to Catalina island and anchor in some pretty cove and install the newly arrived parts. This being the crazy weather year that it has been, there were gales blowing through the channel islands. We dodged those by spending a night in Dana Point and a couple of nights in Long Beach. Just as were were planning to get back on plan ¨c¨ and go find that cove on Catalina, Brenda announced that there would be a complete calm from Point Conception north at least as far as San Francisco. Point Conception is known as the Cape Horn of the Pacific Ocean and we couldn´t pass up a weather window like that. Fortunately, we had our friend Chris aboard and that made hand steering up the coast doable.
Once we got to San Francisco, there always seemed to be more pressing things to do rather than the auto pilot. Now faced with the long passage south, however, the autopilot install moved up to the top of the list. The last pieces to install were the rudder encoder, wheel turn limiter and some cables. The rudder encoder arm on the rudder shaft had been installed previously and I had been trying to figure out how to place the encoder so that its arm would be parallel to the arm on the rudder shaft. There wasn´t much room in the steering box, nor access for my hands and tools. Nonetheless, I got it all installed with the specified 1/8 inch tolerances. That left about 1/2 inch clearance from the steering housing which I was OK with. Everything tested good at the dock.
I sealed up the steering housing and finished a few other tasks. One of those was to put a bracket at the top of the steering housing to hold the canned air horn. We wanted as few loose items in the cockpit as possible, but we needed access to the horn. I was turning the wheel to move some part of the steering gear out of my way when there was a loud crunching noise from below — not good!
Investigating the noise, I discovered that the rudder encoder arm on the rudder had broken in half. I knew I had to break the seals on the steering housing to find out what could have happened. It wasn´t obvious since, after all, that arm has been in place for over six months. Brenda is laughing because we haven’t even left the dock and the auto pilot is inoperative again! You sometimes wonder if certain things were never meant to be. Once apart, the mystery was solved. One of the steering housing bolts stuck into the housing a little over 1/2 inch and the newly installed cross linkage between the rudder arm and the encoder arm had hit that bolt.
When things like this happen, Brenda and I start brainstorming about what we have onboard that might work for a repair. I found a nice piece of Sapele and soon we had another rudder arm. Technically, at this point in the autopilot install, one is supposed to do a sea trial and check all sorts of parameters. In our case, we had a small weather window on Sunday to go north out of the San Francisco Bay to Drakes Bay without fighting strong headwinds. Drakes Bay has been on my list of places to visit before heading south, so off we go.
Well actually, since we have been in a slip for so long, it takes all day Saturday to stash and lash and prepare the inside of the Mahdee. Sunday, we pulled out of the slip at sunrise and motored north. I worked to get Mahdee ready to sail. There were all sorts of things we couldn´t do while in the slip because the bowsprit was shipped. One of those tasks was to hank the jib onto its stay. This is easiest if there are two people up forward. I go out onto the sprit and I need someone else to keep the jib from catching on something as I pull it forward out onto the bowsprit.
There are only Brenda and me onboard Mahdee, so I tell Brenda to just set the autopilot and come forward. I knew it would be a long shot if it worked. Brenda gave me one of those ¨you are crazy looks¨ since she had no idea how to even work the switches. I was busy so I just said figure it out. Long story short, it didn´t work. So we just let Mahdee steer herself without the autopilot while we worked up forward and Brenda periodically went aft to tweak the wheel.
We were almost to the Oakland bridge before we had a single sail ready to fly. At least we were moving. The wind stayed almost directly on the nose as we turned for the Golden Gate bridge and the wind generally stayed there for the entire day. We were supposed to have light southerly winds ahead of a frontal passage. We could see the front off to the West, but the winds stayed on the nose as we headed Northwest. It also rained for a good part of the passage. That gave us reason to work on the auto pilot some more.
We could use the rudder steer mode of the auto pilot while sitting inside the cosy, dry, chart house. That was a really nice thing on a wet and rainy day. One of the main reasons for getting a boat like Mahdee with a chart house was the possibility of having an inside steering station. We finally had one! But clearly, I needed to run through the post-install checks in the auto pilot manual to enable it to compass steer. Those would be easy to do in a big bay like San Francisco — now behind us–or upcoming San Diego, but it would be nice to have more functionality before then.
The other related issue is that I haven´t hooked up and wired the main house batteries. That means that we would have electrical consumption issues while sailing and we plan to mostly sail south. I think I will be doing a lot of hand steering until San Diego.
