Sometimes we’re as slow as molasses about the things we do!

Mahdee, with her double arm worm gear, is so easy to steer whether we’re motoring or sailing that the autopilot hasn’t really been…shall we say…a high priority.  However, David installed it in the spring of 2010 and we did use is to sit in the chart house out of the rain and steer (by remote control) during our trip down the coast from San Francisco in the fall of 2010.  Then, well, we’ve been busy with other things.  The compass didn’t seem to work well–always had a tendency to steer off to one side into a circle.  We finally did the legwork for troubleshooting.  There were great instructions on troubleshooting in the manual and the manufacturer was very helpful on the phone.  The problem was identified, the replacement part (under warranty) sent by the manufacturer and, yea! we’re in business.

We can now steer using the compass heading.  However, doing that, there’s like…nothing to do…we can sit around and twiddle our thumbs (or take up knitting) letting the autopilot do its thing.   However, that will be really good when we’re sailing shorthanded into an anchorage and taking down sails! Or, when reefing the main, etc.

When I returned from Washington, DC a couple weeks ago, I immediately picked up a nasty cold/flu. I really didn’t feel good.  I sat around and did no-brainer tasks like cleaning up my file system on the computer and avoided overtaxing myself.  Then, as I was feeling much better and rearing to go on projects…yep…David got the cold.  He seems to have a “lesser” version of it but he’s in the “do no-brainer tasks on the computer mode” which means….David just wrote a Python program for the little Nokia N810; the program is an anchor watch which sounds an alarm when our GPS sees that we’re outside of a desired circle of water.  This means that instead of me sleeping with the Nokia in front of my face in the bed…we’ll have it sitting nearby able to give us fair warning of dragging anchor.

Why is that I have little to show for my no-brainer stuff and David has a nice little application programmed up?  Clearly my “no-brainer” and his are on entirely different planes.