Author Archives: David

Big Sur

Posted on by under sailing

According to all accounts, the Big Sur coast can be a dangerous place.  There are one or two little hiding places from strong NW winds that a North-bound sailor can take refuge in, but the dangers of approaching those places in high winds may exceed the protective value — especially since the anchoring depths in those places exceeds 60 feet.  For most, the prudent plan is to find a weather window and move up or down and past the entire Big Sur coast before stopping.  On the South end, there is the protective bight of San Simeon.  On the North, there is Monterrey Bay and in between there is about 80 nautical miles of coast.  On our May passage North, we motored non-stop from Santa Cruz Island near Santa Barbara — way far South of Big Sur — all the way to Monterrey in a wonderful weather window with virtually no wind and extremely small waves.  Ideally, I would have preferred a sail up the coast, but a safe motor North can not be over-appreciated.  The predominant Northwesterly winds almost ensure that one can sail South.  The catch is finding a weather window where the winds are strong enough, but not too strong, and the waves are not too big.  Since the winds tend to be strongest in the afternoon, most guides suggests rounding capes and points on the Pacific coast — such as Point Sur — in the morning, or at night.

Carmel is South of Monterrey Bay and is ideally suited for an early morning South-bound rounding of Point Sur.  It is a place I wanted to see from the ocean since it is the final resting place for a large number of my family members.  I remember it being beautiful from land, but the kelp infestation made the view from the ocean much less so.  We made a few turns near the entrances to Pebble Beach and Stillwater Cove.  I think we could have made it into Stillwater Cove, but we might have tangled in the kelp and there wasn’t much room to anchor even if we made it into the cove.  Just outside of the cove, a trawler was anchored in the best place.  Had we anchored nearby, it would have been a rolly uncomfortable night.  Brenda and I decided to press on South.

We knew there was little to no wind, so we raised the mainsail and staysail and sheeted them in tight mostly to control the rolling caused by the waves.  The other reason is that we expected some wind as we got offshore and then we could set the sails rather than having to first raise them when it would surely be dark.  Brenda wanted to reef the mainsail, but I felt that the dropping winds would remain light all night long and we would want to make some speed and distance overnight.  I left Brenda at the helm and took a short nap since I knew that once it was dark, I would probably be doing most of the steering.

Just after sunset, Brenda signaled me with the throttle to come up on deck.  We had a nice breeze and Brenda said that we should probably set the sails for the wind.  Apparently, it had been almost calm for almost two hours and suddenly, the wind had come up.  I set the mainsail on starboard tack with preventer and vang and steered a course that just kept wind in the staysail.  This wasn’t easy since the waves were becoming quite large.  The important thing was to not back the mainsail.  The resulting course was almost due South.  I could see the lighthouse on Point Sur and I knew that the coast South of the Point was much more easterly.  Thus, our heading was taking us further offshore.  Both Brenda and I knew that a gybe would be necessary and the only question was when.  If we gybed too soon and couldn’t hold a course that kept us off the coast, we would have to gybe again — no easy matter at night in rough seas with high winds.   Passing a point, the winds sometimes turn to follow the coast, so if that happened, we might gybe and not be able to stay off the coast on the new tack.

I could make out an ominous black blob near the lighthouse, but could not tell how far away we were.  The pitching and rolling and yawing of Mahdee was taking almost my full effort to control.  I asked Brenda how far offshore we were several times and got no answer.  When Brenda did talk, I could tell she was extremely frustrated.  It seems that she was having a really hard time just staying still enough to see the chart, let alone make an estimate of distance.  She suggested that we could gybe, but cautioned that shore looked really black and evil and still too close.  I said let’s wait, but we should reef the mainsail because Mahdee was becoming very hard to control.  I’m glad it was dark or else I’m sure I’d have seen in Brenda’s eyes “I told you so” with that.  We have never reefed Mahdee under such conditions with a loaded up sail.  Anticipating such a need, I had set up that capability as one of the projects completed in Brisbane before our trip South — along with the well-lighted compass dial that was making steering in these conditions remotely possible.

We have a boat rule that at night on the ocean, everyone on deck is tethered in.  In the current situation one can add to the hazards — short-handed sailing, a water temperature around 12C, 25+ knots of wind on a broad-reach with Mahdee surfing over 12 knots and 2+ meter waves coming from at least two directions with huge hand-like wave spikes all around us — and the possibility of a man overboard rescue is nil.  To live, it is imperative to stay on board.  And with Mahdee being tossed all around with hard rolls, just staying inboard would be a challenge, let alone doing something we have never done before.

We have jacklines strung along the deck for moving about and padeyes at key locations such as the helm to clip into while steering.   There are three jacklines that one can clip into before leaving the chart-house depending on which way one intends to go.  For the gybe, Brenda needed to leave the chart-house and take the helm.  We believe in tethers with two lanyards so that one is never untethered.  I was clipped into the starboard helm padeye with my short tether, so Brenda clipped onto the port jackline and came aft and clipped into the port helm padeye with her short tether.  I stuck around the cockpit while Brenda got the feel of the helm.  Once she had a working technique, I literally crawled the 10 feet forward from the cockpit to the mainmast.

As I got myself settled under the main boom I had to smile.  This was sailing!  Mahdee was screaming along well over hull speed as waves broke at her stern and foamy froth engulfed both gunnels amidships.  Occasionally, due to the strong quartering sea Mahdee would do her Luke Skywalker snap=rolls from side-to-side.  All this while I figured out how I was going to hold onto and slack the main halyard on the port side of the mast, while cranking the starboard mast winch with the tack reefing line.  Ideally, I would also crank in on the clew reefing line which feeds to a winch just above my head on the main boom.  Alas, I didn’t have three hands, nor any self tailing winches.  As I set myself up, Brenda yelled out to know if I was still aboard and OK.  Chances are, she would not know if I were swept overboard and she couldn’t see me where I needed to be (sitting rather than standing) for this reefing operation.  So I yelled out that I was fine and set to work.  Joy, the tack was coming down and all was under control.  With the second reef tack in position, I set to cranking the boom winch to set the clew.  That was real work since I was fighting the main sheets, but it worked OK.  I reset the main halyard to tighten the luff and then crawled back to the cockpit where I could see that the sail had been blown under the number four port main shroud.  I probably could have left the sail where it was especially since we had a known gybe coming up, but I was concerned with chaff.  A little work at the mast and out the leach popped from under the shroud and all was exactly as I wished.

Well OK, I could wish for smaller seas.  These were tall and close together.  They were fast building — probably because we were still heading away from shore on this tack.  I was at the helm again and Brenda was trying to make measurements on the charts, but she couldn’t even get a pencil near chart or paper because a lurch would cause the pencil to hit hard and break the lead.  It was none to early to gybe.  So, Brenda worked her way back out to the port helm, clipping in all along the way.  The first step (actually second step as I later realized) in the gybe was to release the preventer and vang and that required me to take a trip forward.  This time I had to go forward on the port side of Mahdee which was the lee-side.  Further, I had to switch jacklines to go forward of the mainmast.  I spent much of the journey on my butt with feet braced against the toe rails and watching with fascination the foam come up to and sometimes over the rail.  Eventually I got to the preventer and released it and worked slowly aft.  Bringing the line outboard around the main shrouds was much more difficult while managing tethers and jacklines.  Turn one way and the tether wraps around your legs, turn the other and you have an acrobatic move to get the tensioned preventer line over your head.  The six-foot tether on the mainmast-to-cockpit jackline was just a little too short to let me pass the preventer around the main shrouds.  In time, however, I got the preventer lashed up against the main boom and set to work routing the vang back to the cockpit where I could manage its tension while hauling in on the mainsheets.

A controlled gybe requires that the sheets be hauled in before the boat is turned.  As the main sheets are hauled in on Mahdee, the center of sail effort moves farther and farther aft.  This tends to make Mahdee round up into the wind.  This is a problem since the end objective here was to turn away from the wind and gybe.  During The Great San Francisco Schooner Race, we had three crewmembers hauling in on the mainsheet just before the gybe.  The winds were a little higher in San Francisco, but the waves where nothing like what we had to deal with now.  But now there was just me hauling in on the sheet and I was also trying to pay out the vang so that the boom would stay rock steady.  I worked as fast as I could, but I think even the trio of senior citizens during the race would have been faster.  Brenda had her hands full keeping Mahdee from rounding up, but had to help when the vang jammed.  In between hauling, I was noticing that Mahdee’s boomkin was being buried in wave faces that were very steep and coming within inches of the aft deck.  Finally, I couldn’t get an inch more of sheet in, even when the sail unloaded the sheets while Mahdee was being banged by a wave.  Brenda turned the helm and the boom came across.  I started to let out sheet to reduce Mahdee’s tendency to round up in the new direction, but I realized that I had forgotten the REAL step one for a gybe — move the running backs forward!  The jib was also backing, so I quickly tacked the jib while Brenda yelled out headings as Mahdee turned further and further up into the wind.

Without the ability to let out the main boom until the running backs were pulled forward out of the way, despite Brenda’s best efforts, Mahdee was still turning up into the wind and as she came up to a beam reach, she accelerated like a banshee and beam on to the very, very large waves, she rolled hard from side to side.  We were screaming along like a surfer in the curl of a wave.  I was clipping and unclipping tethers to get myself onto the jackline nearest the starboard running backs.  I released the running back and was hugging the mainshrouds to avoid being thrown overboard despite the tether while trying to secure the running back in its forward position when I heard a loud bang followed by a scream from Brenda.  Mahdee was still running straight and true–so I had to laugh since I figured Brenda was now very wet.  The view into the wave troughs was spectacular in the moonlight — or maybe more like something from an old black and white horror flick.  We were flying and I had to get back to the cockpit and ease the mainsheet in order for Mahdee to fall-off to a better heading.  Boy, was the cockpit wet.  Water everywhere which explained the scream, but the details of how the water got over Mahdee’s port quarter are still murky.

After getting Mahdee settled on the port tack, we could see that our heading would be good all the way to Piedras Blancas Point, the southern point of the Big Sur coast.  We had a spirited run for a few more hours and then the wind slowly died until just before dawn when they went to zero.  We started the motor and powered into the rising sun and into San Simeon.  It was beautiful there, but after anchoring, both Brenda and I took a much needed nap.

Looking back, pulling up the saved weather data, and comparing it to our gps track, I am pretty sure that we coincidentally hit the biggest winds and waves on the coast.  We ended up farther off the coast than planned and as one moves offshore, the wind and waves tend to increase up until a point.  If we had been further offshore, the wind and waves probably would have been less — not that I would have wanted to find out.  Also, if we had arrived at that offshore point even and hour earlier or later, the wind and waves would have been less.  These last few days have had bigger winds later in the evening and than normal.

All in all, it was an adventure.  As usual, Mahdee was fully up to the task.  Brenda and I work as hard as we can to keep up with Mahdee and her abilities.  I am sure that it is our capabilities and experience that are the biggest limitation.  Life is best experienced in contrasts.  The contrast between the stark night of big wind and waves off of Big Sur was in wonderful contrast to the beautiful and peaceful anchorage at San Simeon.  We rewarded ourselves with an additional night there before continuing our journey South.

Heading South

Posted on by under living aboard, Musings, sailing

I like our lifestyle.  We work on projects for a while someplace.  Then, we go sailing someplace else and get to see how our projects hold up to reality.  In the process, we get new ideas so that when we get to that someplace else, we do projects to implement the new ideas — and so on.  I think we would go nuts if we only did projects without traveling, or traveling without the projects.  Both are needed and in the right proportion with the right intervals.  So having done a bunch of projects in Brisbane, it was now time to travel and see how our new capabilities work and how things hold up.  The trip North to Drakes Bay was a non-eventful voyage.  We motor-sailed into light headwinds with rain and drizzle.  For us, the rain and drizzle were great.  We don’t get enough of that kind of weather in Southern California, and we saw very little of it in San Francisco.  So we enjoyed the passage and anchored in Drakes Bay in the early afternoon.  That gave us most of the afternoon to enjoy the sights and sounds of this majestic location.  During that interval, we had sunny and clear times and complete fog-ins alternating every few hours.  Definitely not boring.  We also had the entire bay to ourselves until late at night when another sail boat arrived.

We could have stayed in Drakes Bay for several days, but the weather to head South was perfect, so the next morning, we weighed anchor and set a course for the Farallones.  I was looking forward to passing close by these rocky islands that I had heard stories of.  We had nice following seas and increasing winds as the day wore on.  Around noon, we passed close by the southern island and we set about to gybe so that we could head towards Half Moon Bay.  The Gybe was uneventful despite the high winds that were accelerating us to 8 knots and beyond.  Here we saw lots of whales.  Several different kinds, lots of spouting and even a couple of tail-fluke shows–probably hump-back whales.  As we approached shore, we spotted a couple of other sail boats heading South.  We dropped most of our sails before we entered the Half Moon Bay channel leaving the main up until just before entering the harbor and completing a 50 mile sail.

In Half Moon Bay, we anchored near where we anchored on our trip North last May.  With the afternoon sun, the place was just as beautiful as we remembered it.  The green hills were fabulous in the sun which is how it was during our last visit.  I am told that fog is more the norm.  It was so nice that, like last May, we decided to stay an extra day.

Brenda keeps a very close eye on the weather models when we are traveling.  We had good internet access, so I downloaded onto my Nokia N810 Maemo Mapper application updated NOAA charts, USGS topo maps and satellite photos of places we might visit on the way South.  While I was downloading all that info, Brenda noted that the weather models indicated that by departing the next morning, we would make similar speed, so we planned another 50 mile leg to stop in Santa Cruz for a night and a day, then leaving late in the evening to make the longer distance down the Big Sur coast when the winds were lighter and also arrive during daylight at San Simeon where we could anchor and rest.  That would bypass Monterrey (which was too rolly in the anchorage last May) and get us visits in two new anchorages.

When sailing, things never go exactly as planned.  We did take advantage of the great fuel prices in Half Moon Bay by topping off the tanks with 80 gallons of diesel — the first time ever we have had the fuel tanks full.  I think we took a year to use the 1/2 tank level that we launched Mahdee with — this is something I kid my power boating brother-in-law about.  The old fighter pilot credo is that the only time you have too much fuel is when you are on fire.  So, we now had full fuel tanks just in case, but I much, much prefer sailing.

As we pulled out of Half Mood Bay to raise the sails the wind was blowing strong.  It was actually blowing stronger than Brenda and I expected that early in the morning.  We raised the Mainsail and the staysail.  Strange, the winds seemed to be dying, so we raised the foresail and the jib too.  With all four lowers set, we were broad-reaching at slightly over 4 knots.  Not exactly screaming.  I could see a sailboat ahead of us going South with a spinnaker up.  I think we were gaining on him.  He probably noticed that to, because down came the spinnaker and with no sails, they pulled ahead, no doubt running their engine.  I don’t give up on sailing that easily.

By mid-day, our speed was closer to 3 knots and if we gybed just past Pigeon Point, we could sail/drift right into our old anchorage in Ano Nuevo just before sunset.  That’s exactly what we did.  Of course, just as we were ready to drop sails, the winds came up strong.  A typical sailing day — high winds while trying to raise or lower sails and while trying to weigh or drop anchor with the motor, almost no winds when you have the sails set and you want the wind.

Ano Nuevo was also just as beautiful as we remembered it from last May.  It was also rolly, but I don’t think it was as rolly as in May.  The swell was more from the protected Northwest rather than the exposed Southerly swell of last May.  After months and months in the silty waters of San Francisco, I couldn’t help but be struck by how very clear the water was and the anchor came up clean as a whistle the next morning.

Having not made it to Santa Cruz, it was time to re-plan the trip.  The models predicted that the winds would be non-existent until about 11AM, but then the winds should be good for a 50 mile day which would get us near Carmel.  I have always wanted to see Carmel from the water.  The guide books are not nearly so enthusiastic.  We thought that if we got there before dark, we might be able to get in and anchor despite the reports of kelp, and if not, we would continue South over night when the forecast winds would be reasonable and arrive in San Simeon sometime during the following day.  We decided to save the forecast onto the computer since we were not sure if we would have internet access for the next couple of days.

Monterrey bay was forecast to be a wind hole with no wind, so we headed slightly off shore in very light winds to avoid the bay entrance.  We had all sails except the staysail up as we crept along at 2-3 knots.  Two other sail boats with not a stich of sail up motored along the shore and past us.  But, as the day wore on, the winds crept up as forecast.  Soon, we were actually going fast enough to get to Carmel before dark and I could see that we were going to pass the sailboats with no sails up off in the distance in Monterrey Bay.  Also, as the winds came up, we saw the whales again.  Apparently they like wind and waves because we saw no whales in the calmer winds near Ano Nuevo.

Pretty soon, we were moving right along at over eight knots and surfing down the faces of some of the waves.  Lots of fun in the daylight.  Mahdee was a little squirrelly in these conditions.  It was time to take some sail down and the obvious choice was to drop the foresail.  It was being partially blanked by the main anyway and then we would be able to point more towards Carmel without the sail flogging in the lee of the main.

Normally, while dropping the fore, Brenda steers and ensures the halyards which run to the cockpit run out smoothly while I control the halyards at the foreshrouds and ensure the gaff comes down smoothly and stays horizontal.  It took Brenda (or me) full attention at the helm to keep Mahdee pointed right, so I decided to drop the foresail by myself.  It came down very nicely.  We left the main and jib up until we got closer to Carmel.

I like to train and practice so that when things are going badly, emergency actions are not being done for the first time.  One area that I wanted more practice in was heaving-to.  In San Francisco Bay, we hove-to under various sails.  With the two sails of a sloop there are may less sail combinations. But the best hove-to configuration can also change with wind and waves.  We were not entirely satisfied with our hove-to angle in the Bay winds.  I wanted to heave-to with mainsail only in moderately high winds with waves.  Here was our chance.  The winds were probably around 25 knots, the waves were pretty steep, but not too big.  So, I say to Brenda that we are going to drop the jib on the run, and then come up on a starboard tack and heave-to.  She is not thrilled, but I think she also wants to see how Mahdee will sit in these conditions.

I go forward to drop the jib and tie it into the bowsprit netting and Mahdee is still scooting along at over 8 knots with full mainsail.  While running, I like to rig preventers and vangs on the boom to better control the spar.  The preventer keeps the boom from coming back and gybing if the wind shifts or the boat yaws off a wave.  The vang holds the boom down so that it doesn’t ride up and down and chafe the sail on the rigging.  Mahdee was designed with a jaunty mainsail and foresail which keeps the boom up high on a run.  This is good since a surefire way to break a boom is to have it rigged with preventers and then have the boat roll and drag the boom through the water.  Mahdee is unlikely to do that.

The vang and preventers are especially important in light winds and rolly seas.  We had waves, but with lots of wind directly aft, the mainsail really didn’t need the preventers too much so the plan was for me to remove the vang and preventer, haul in the sheet and then we’d turn up into the wind for a starboard hove-to position.  I released the vang and then went forward to release the preventer and Brenda kept Mahdee on a rail straight course.  But, the instant I released the preventer, the wind died completely.  The big waves were still there, and without the full and drawing mainsail to stabilizer her, Mahdee started bucking.  The main boom was bouncing up and down and with the fully released 200 feet of main sheet, the boom was also sweeping from port to starboard and back again.

I had secured the vang line to the boom, but the shockled preventer was ripped out of my hand and shot aft towards Brenda.  Brenda saw it coming and went into defensive mode crouched next to the steering housing with a hand over her head to keep the lines from around her neck and one on the wheel to try to steer.  By the time I got back to the cockpit, the 200 feet of mainsheet was wrapped around everything and tangled with the preventer.  The preventer line had been sucked through main sheet blocks, several of which had multiple lines going through where only one was intended to be.  Meanwhile, Mahdee was still bucking and the boom was bouncing and the shock loading on the sheets and preventers made it very dangerous to get hands near the blocks.  Brenda was still hunkered down steering from the cockpit sole and I worked cautiously to pull in the mainsheet and untangle the sheet.

Eventually, I had the main sheeted in and we worked Mahdee into the direction of the waves.  The windex, however, was spinning around and around and the tell tails were slack and the only thing happening was that the short steep waves were rolling and bouncing Mahdee all over.  So much for that experiment.  Nobody would want to heave-to with no wind, so it wasn’t exactly a failure.  We started the Cummins engine and motored into Carmel to look for a place to anchor for the night.

Autopilot Woes

Posted on by under misc

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.

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