LongPac Boat Work Day - autopilot work

Photos courtesy of Serge

Nathan put back in place the NKE brain unit and reconnected everything. It looks like things are working fine again, even though at times, the pilot seemed to be behaving in a little weird way when we tried it under sail, however, it is the best bet for competitive sailing during LongPac. It should be able to drive the boat for hours on end, at least during the day as we know that it wouldn't deplete the battery that way. So I am thinking of sleeping during the day mostly, probably morning as typically the wind is lighter and autopilots work much better in light winds (wind vanes work better in heavier wind and are useless when there is no wind...or not enough apparent wind to go through the windvane).

Sailing alone, I would set the NKE pilot on wind mode so that I can set the sails for a specific wind angle and have the pilot take over from there. If there are small wind shifts, it should try to follow it.

Nat changed the connector for the spare autopilot (called 'Ray') that you can see attached to the tiller here. It is a tillerpilot and is the backup for the NKE pilot. This is only in rudder mode (kind of a compass mode because it takes over the minute you put it on, and then you can adjust direction by 1 or 10 degrees up or down

This is the spare pilot for 'Ray', or something that could be used at night if I really was so exhausted that I would need to go to sleep. 'Nick' (the NKE autopilot) or 'Ray' can be run at night for short periods of time, so it certainly is possible to do sail changes and gybes during the night, but it might be too much draining on the power if I was to sleep for a couple of hours at night. So I might decide to sleep for a couple of hours before nightfall too (and past the Farallones island)

Nat working on the electrical connection for 'Ray'