From: Phil
Sent: August-10-09 5:13 AM
To: Will Curry
Subject: Re: spare HYDROVANE – 2

Dear Will

I have enclosed some photos of the vane. The Stubby size was only OK if I lowered the shaft. Needless to say it does put the bearing almost on the water but I shall keep a close examination of it in the next few months. You will see that in harbour I put on the rubber strop to stop the rudder “chattering” at night. I did find that the friction on the vane angling device was NOT strong enough such that it tended to slide back to the vertical?

However, the performance overall was amazing! As you say in the instructions the key to it all was trimming the sails. But with a solo journey of just under 4000 miles (Grenada to Largs on the west coast of SCOTLAND, it came into it’s own in the first two weeks of the trip.

The wind increased from 20 to 40 kts. with gusts to 50+. The direction was fairly reasonable giving me a fetch of about 40 degrees off the wind. With the waves hitting from various angles it became very uncomfortable and to be able to leave the VANE “in charge” was a great asset. To the credit of the equipment I did allow myself 2 hour sleep periods and was confident that I would not wake up to any disasters. The worrying times were always as the wind increased and to see the vane in its fully raked position just laying over while keeping the boat on track was a delight. As expected the light off wind sailing was not so good. BUT I was so well topped up with battery power it was easy to switch on the Autohelm 7000 and let it do some work.

A humorous ditty occurred as I decided to “find” the AZORES High, and steered on a northerly track making it a 70 degrees wind angle. Having reset “stumpy”–the vane, I went to sleep. When I awoke on the alarm and did my usual check of the track, I found that “stumpy “had decided to go back onto a heading for the AZORES!! NOT what I had wanted but cunning. Of course on closer inspection I realized the wind had veered to achieve this!

I could go on but I will finish by saying that as a retired pensioner I thought the price was a bit hard to bear, BUT only days into the trip I was blessing the day I decided to install it.

Thank you for a great piece of gear.

Regards Phil

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