Change is in the air. We’re on the verge of beginning the next stage of our sailing journey: exploring the South Pacific. It’s also the start of us sailing as a family, which means we need to adapt the boat to make it a bit easier for either of us to handle by ourselves.
Due to autopilot issues, extra willing hands and sheer stubbornness we’ve so far hand-steered the near 11,000 miles of this trip. But, the addition of a baby to our crew list means that we’re embracing a much more hands off approach to steering the boat. Plus, there’s nothing like the consistent trade winds of ocean sailing to get you thinking about what would work best.
After a lot of time, research and budget juggling we decided to install a Hydrovane. This is a wind vane self-steering system which is ideal for both short-handed crew and ocean sailing. Unlike our autopilot (which is now fixed and ready to go again) it requires no power whatsoever, it has its own independent rudder and it can even be mounted off-set which is perfect for our boat as we have a stern ‘sugar-scoop’ and centrally mounted swim-ladder.
James even installed the whole thing by himself. This was unlike any boat project we’d attempted before as it involved making a pvc pipe mock-up, drilling into the transom, re-configuring the swim ladder by adding hinges and moving it plus an awful lot of head scratching and well-meaning dock neighbours adding their advice and lending extra tools.
So, without further ado, we introduce our latest crew member, and a few shots of how it all went.
