Don't Wait
Bob: Which Autopilot to buy is related to the weight of your boat. The catalogs will have a chart to help you decide which one select. At the beginning of this summer I installed a Raymarine ST100 onto my C-22. I have wanted an autopilot for many years, and this year I finlly took my petty cash and bought one from Sailnet.com for about $400. It came with the remote for free, which is something that I probably would have never actually spent the money for, but is now something that we could never do without. It's great to be able to go up to the mast to raise or lower the sails, and have the remote (wired remote) in your pocket. Also, you can sit either at the mast, or up near the bow and let the boat take you for a ride. We use ours much of the time. It doesn't drain the battery much and have used it for many days without recharging our size 27 battery. We actually do connect our GPS into the autopilot, and can get the boat to sail on a line between two waypoints. This isn't that difficult to do. Raymarine has been great about service for ours. (I had a problem with one of the buttons on the remote, and they took care of it very quickly and for free). I mounted mine on the Starboard side. (I think that this is the standard side, but it could be reprogrammed to work on either side). I made a wooden bracket that screws onto the coaming with one screw which has a knob on it. It looks nice and works well, and when it is removed, there is only a little stainless steel socket that is hardly noticable. (I didn't like the appearance of the recommended method for mounting the autopilot). If you want, I will take some photos of the mounting this weekend and e-mail them to you. My e-mail address is aadjcamacci@panetwork.com , if you are interested. One other thing that I would like to mention is that my sons really enjoy the autopilot. For kids that grew up with computers and Nintendo, it seems more natural to control the boat with a remote, than a tiller. Also, they are the ones who are figuring how to navigate the boat with the GPS plugged into the autopilot. (The " " in ST1000 is that it is ready to accept information from a GPS). Although I wish I had gotten an autopilot years ago, right now you can get a lot of electronics built into an autopilot for a reasonable price. I also want to mention that for motoring the boat any distance it is just great. It actually saves time, because the boat stays on course instead of wandering around. Aldo
