Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim Cate
Can it do so when the batteries are dead?
Jim
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Windvanes and Autohelms are for opposite ends of the
weather spectrum: Windvanes struggle to do their job on sunny, light-winds, flat seas days, whereas Autohelms struggle to cope in 30 knots, big seas and usually pouring rain; if I have to take over and hand
helm, I'd want it to be on the flat-day!
For the OP: We have a Monitor so are biased in favour of servo-pendulum vanes generally and the Monitor in particular; for me they provide more 'steerage' than Hydrovanes and the like, particularly when the
wind turns light though that problem seems more pronounced on larger/heavier yachts than yours or ours. That said, I don't know your
boat, but 'centre cockpit' suggests a need for longer & more complex routing of the control lines than ours needs, so that may tip the balance in favour of the
Hydrovane?
They all
work and whilst some seem to do so better than others, to a degree it's the size,
keel configuation, etc. of the boat they're fitted to rather than the wind-vane itself that makes a lot of those differences.