It has been a very long time since I posted - our trip to Nepal was covered on Facebook posts, but I do plan to put up a Nepal video slide show and will link from this blog when that is done (hopefully this year!)
In the meantime, we have downsized our sailboat from 32 foot Swamp Angel to 24 foot Lion Passant. Lion is a Farr 727 that weighs about 1/5 of Swamp Angel but sails well and has served Rani and I for a couple of trips to the cottage and one short 6 day Gulf Island cruise. I also managed to persuade my 6' plus friend Ian to spend 6 days on her cruising locally! Next week I am off to Barclay Sound on my own for 2-3 weeks and figured I would need an autopilot to help with this trip, which entails sailing down to Victoria and up the outside of Vancouver Island alongside the West Coast and Juan de Fuca trails.
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| Lion Passant is a Farr 727 made by North Star boats in Ontario back in the 1970s. She is racy but also has minimal camp cruising facilities |
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| Underway flying the very manageable spinnaker. Note the custom sail cover I made out of a piece of high quality tarp. |
The problem with installing tiller pilots is that they require precise positioning in 3 dimensions to work properly and you either need to mount a special bracket on the tiller to raise or lower the pin position or one on the boat to move the autopilot up and down, out or in and fore and aft, to do this. On both our Coast 34 Ladybug II and now on Lion Passant I have built cantilever mounts to move the autopilot relative to the tiller and cockpit coaming.
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| Raymarine ST2000 tillerpilot mounted on custom cantilever mount |
For $130 you can buy a lovely aluminum bracket from Raymarine. This one cost me about $10 and is made using a 3/4" galvanized flange found in the iron pipe section of our hardware store as well as a 3/4" PVC conduit male threaded and female socket fitting, a length of PVC conduit, and a female to female coupler for reinforcement and to make things thicker to receive the brass tillerpilot socket. There is also a wooden dowel fitted inside the conduit to make the outer end stronger where it is drilled for the socket. Ideally this dowel should run end to end so as to reinforce the threaded section too, which is a weak point. I had to sand down a piece of dowel I had that was a hair too large. I used epoxy to fasten the pvc pieces but it would be better to use the appropriate PVC primer and cement. The wood backing block was cut to an angle that makes the flange approximately 90 degrees to the tiller arm. I epoxied this to the coaming using 5 minute epoxy. It should also be screwed or through bolted because the forces on this bracket can be quite large.
The version of this on our Coast 34 lasted for 4 years and many thousands of miles of sailing and motoring. You can unscrew the bracket from the base too if you are leaving the boat in outside storage and want to save the plastic from UV degradation.
