From: Craig McMaster
Sent: Monday, May 27, 2024
To: sarah@hydrovane.com
Cc: Krystle McMaster
Subject: Tiller Pilot Saves the Day

Hi Sarah!
Trust you and the rest of the gang are well and enjoying life in the Med! It is a joy to click through the sailing.kaia Instagram feed.

We love our Hydrovane. We gave it a name. We remain mesmerized watching it work. We tell all our cruising friends about how great it is. But not until our main autopilot decided to die on night one of a three day passage did we learn just how critical it can be to have a Hydrovane installed on a cruising boat.

Heeding the advice that you and Will probably gave us in person we purchased a tiller autopilot way back in 2016 to serve as a backup to our main unit. It was a few hundred bucks at the time and felt like an easy insurance policy. I ran the wire, installed the exterior mounted power supply plug on Small World’s stern, and then we wrapped the tiller pilot in some plastic bags and buried it under hoards of gear. Eight years later and that tiller pilot was exhumed from its tomb in an aft cabin locker and quickly heralded as a king of the sea!

I had spent a lot of time thinking about how we would mount the tiller pilot if and when the day came that it was needed, but I never felt I had come up with an elegant solution. Confirming the notion that necessity is the mother of invention my makeshift mount turned out to be more than adequate for the minimal loads necessary to trim the Hydrovane rudder.

I’m not sure I can express the relief Krystle and I felt when, after swapping turns hand steering for 10 hours, we kicked on the little tiller pilot and in disbelief watched it hold course like a champ. The Hydrovane/tiller autopilot combo get a solid vote for MVP from the crew of Small World!

Your Steadfast Hydrovane Evangelists,
Craig & Krystle