Why didn’t I fit a wind vane system 10 years ago?
I lacked the money, everybody else swore by autopilots, and I didn’t know about a comparable system. The wind vane would have saved me from some very long hours at the tiller crossing the North Sea or going south by Jæ ren and crossing the Skagerrak into the Baltic’s. In retrospect it is rather annoying. It’s hard to install a pendulum windvane system on Salt as she has a transom-hung-rudder. No matter what I do or system, I choose, I need an extended support frame – which will increase weight on the transom (exactly where I don’t want any extra burden). Besides, an extrusion outside of the rudder will make it vulnerable during harbour navigation. I could have chosen a trimtab, mounted directly on to the rudder. However, most trimtabs I know about works as a servo system to generate enough push to move the rudder. It works – but I don’t want to permanently fix a trimtab to my rudder and even a very good trimtab does not have the power to steer as a pendulum system. While the trimtab wo
