Garmin autopilot lost functionality

[mqholt]

We are on day nine of our crossing of the Atlantic on our 45 foot catamaran Serene. Yesterday we were sailing through some fairly confused seas with about 1 to 2 m of swell. We were on a beam reach and our Garmin autopilot was working hard.

And then it stopped working. We got an error message saying “Autopilot controller lost. All autopilot functionality disabled.” We inspected the control unit and it was very warm. We left it off for a while and then recycled the power.

After that it seems to work fine, but we are afraid to use it much and we’ve been mostly hand steering.

Does anyone know what might have caused this problem, and what we might do? Thanks

[donradcliffe]

Reef the main one more notch

[mqholt]

Originally Posted by donradcliffe

Reef the main one more notch

Thanks! We took the main down completely right after the autopilot failure and are only running with the parasailor.

[SailingHarmonie]

If the autopilot is “working hard”, something is wrong. It might be with your sail plan, it might be with your sail trim, it might be with the tuning of your autopilot, or some combination.

If you can steer the boat easily by hand to a straight course, then the issue is almost surely with the tuning of the response of your autopilot. If hand steering is very difficult, then the problem is in the setup of the boat.

So many people come to big boats these days without really learning what a properly trimmed boat sails like. They just count on the autopilot to power through a massively unbalanced helm. It works—kind of—right up until it doesn’t.

Unrelated to the autopilot issues, doesn’t it scare you to be carrying ONLY the parasailor? Can you get it put away if the wind suddenly picks up without the mainsail to blanket it? Double that at night…