Sufficiently powerful or fast enough for heavy weather?
Aside from their voracious need for power – especially when the going gets tough – the Achilles heel of autopilots is the inevitability of mechanical break-downs. For a short handed crew the only alternative of hand steering is dangerous due to the exhaustion it will cause. Even if the autopilot itself never fails any one of thousands of other failures of other devices can stop the flow electricity and, in turn, render any autopilot useless. The probability of being without the autopilot, especially in bad conditions, is simply too great………and the resulting risk should be unacceptable. Recreational boat owners have come to develop a certain confidence in their autopilots. That comfort changes when a full day of usage becomes twenty four hours instead of six or eight hours, there is no ducking out of bad weather and the batteries cannot be ‘plugged-in’ for an overnight charge. That is when mechanical self steering proves to be indispensable. Ironically, users of autopilots do not always
