to most of new generations of ocean crossing rowers, Autohelm is considered to be a “must” to have equipment. It lives at the back of the stern cabin of my “Spirit of Waubun” made by Rannoch Adventure.
My Autohelm stopped working early this morning, in the dark! I know, my noise friend has been working SO HARD from day 1 until today. The autohelm control/deck repeater started and kept beeping, and earlier on it started to make “Standby” by itself!!!
Oh no, we have about 700 nautical miles to go yet! I’m not about taking out a spare one, yet! So I tried to convince Ran to row using hand steering until I figure out the problem and fix it…
Hand steering instead of auto steering is definitely not Ran’s cup of tea! Of course, what made things harder are strong wind and current pushing us around all different directions…and both of batteries are on alert to be low, very low… I was hoping for daylight as usual (even if there is no sun, solar panels may be mercy enough to charge our batteries 1/2 full!) We have only had 4 sunny days out of 31 days!
“KTBMF”, as our dear friend Charlie wrote on my boat, keep the boat move forward. Row east, use compass, if all powered electronics are down! I told myself and unhappy Ran! I had to laugh at myself: if there is no electricity, what good is it to be an electrical engineer! But what I’m about to fix needs no sophisticated EE training.
Hope the episode is memorable and educational (to me): take good care of my cabin mate even though it is very noisy and manage the limited resources better in the vast ocean like the North Atlantic.
