Dirty little secret — Cupcake Afloat

Here’s another dirty little secret for you. (And I feel comfortable confiding my dirty little secrets here on the Internets because I know I am among friends and Russian trolls. (Side note, years ago when the Internet was new, Ellen and I stumbled across the website for her private school alma mater. Her mother, my mother-in-law, Pinky, also graduated from The Winchester Thurston School for Wayward Girls. Anyway, dear old W-T was compiling a database of alums, so we filled out the form on Pinky’s behalf. In the section where it asked about hobbies, we entered “turtle collecting.” As far as we know, Pinky doesn’t collect turtles, but it was and remains a fun tidbit about her.)

(Have you noticed that occasionally I lose track of my parenthesis in my entertaining (and informative) side notes? (The trick, which I often forget to follow, is to count how many “(“ you use and make sure you have the same number of “)” by the time the thought is complete.))

Anyway, the dirty little secret for today is not about turtles or turtle collecting. Those are not dirty. And thanks to the Winchester Thurston website, they are not secrets either. No, the dirty little secret I am sharing today is that we seldom steer our boat. We leave that task to the autopilot (named Gloria for reasons I won’t go into here today because I loathe digressions).

About 80% of the time when we are underway, the autopilot holds the course. The only time we really hand-steer is at the start and end of a trip.

What this picture doesn’t show is how much the boat is rocking. All the positive reviews of this anchorage came from catamarans. They don’t rock and roll like monohulls.

Often I will engage the autopilot so I can do a little task like furl the sails or drink an iced tea, then I will take over driving again when I am properly hyrdated. Certainly yesterday when we sailed from the rolly, uncomfortable anchorage at Alder Cay, across the 10,000’ deep blue water of the Tongue of the Ocean to this rolly, gorgeous anchorage in West Bay on New Providence Island, the autopilot drove the whole way.

Well, not the whole way. I drove the last 12 miles or so. Why? Because the autopilot broke. Everyone’s autopilot breaks eventually and we knew this day was coming. For months now, the autopilot would occasionally bind a little bit after we turned it off. Didn’t know (and still don’t) if it’s a motor problem or a ball bearing problem (Fletch knows it’s all ball-bearings nowadays, but I’m not convinced).

In any event, yesterday when I disengaged the autopilot at sea to hand steer for a few minutes so I could feel hard-core (the wind was up, the waves were up, it was a sporting day), the binding was pretty severe. When I tried to reengage the machine, it did nothing. No problem. It turns out a new unit is only something like $1,900 and would need to be shipped out here at great additional cost. Yikes.

So today Moss, Ellen, and I pulled the drive unit (a Raymarine Type 2S linear drive if anyone feels like sending us a gift) out of its spot in the bowels of the boat so we could take a look. After some exciting disassembly (exciting because it is always tons of fun to learn how things work) we determined that a) the bearings in the arm are probably binding a bit but there’s nothing we can do about that now and b) the electronic clutch mechanism had both come loose from its mooring and had developed a short circuit across its wires.

Autopilot back in its natural habitat. Yes, the black spots on the hoses are probably mold.

We insulated the wires and re-secured the clutch. So far the drive unit works. I am both pleased with the repair and concerned that the unit will fail some other way. Or the same way. But I’m not afraid of it any more. I know its secrets.

Just like you know mine.

Now we are all going for a swim.

Cruising tip of the day: don’t trust anchorage recommendations from catamaran sailors. This anchorage is rolly. How rolly? So rolly our electric toothbrush keeps falling out of the charger! The privations and discomforts we put up with are truly without number.

This cool customer is keeping her eye on the fishing lines we trolled behind us when we sailed deep water. She was full of bloodlust for a tuna. Didn’t catch one but we will try again tomorrow on our way to Nassau.

School of little fishies under the boat are periodically spooked by what may be a trumpet fish lurking nearby. When they get scared, lots of the little fish jump out of the water.