Summer update

July and August are my busiest times on the magazine so we didn't do much sailing on our return from Boulogne. I did however manage to get Ollie from Seapower to fit the new Raymarine EV-1 tiller pilot, which I bought at Easter after years of putting up with the Autohelm ST2000, which is not big enough for the boat, steering an S-shaped course and being useless in a following sea.

I'm not entirely convinced by his work. In the course of doing the electrical work for the new engine, and then fitting the autopilot:

• both house batteries failed, see previous blog entries
• the fuel gauge and depth gauge both stopped working and had to be remedied
• the GPS corrupted and lost all charts on the plotter and on the SD card
• the log display died (although to be fair it was on its way out anyway) and the "true" wind reading was no longer available, which may be as a result of the log, although as far as I know only the display was affected
• the electric bilge pump was disconnected
• the range of the VHF (and the AIS, which uses the same aerial) seems to have been reduced to around two miles
• the tiller pilot was set up the wrong way around so that as soon as you engaged it it went into a spiral of steering the wrong way and trying to correct itself by steering further the wrong way. so it turned you in very small circles.

Some of this is down to chance and/or an ageing boat and equipment, but it seems surprising that so much has gone wrong. Garmin told me they had never heard of all the charts on the plotter and the SD card corrupting before, although updating the software and reimporting the charts has fixed that problem.

Fortunately we had a day sail with our son Ben and his partner Anne in July where we managed to diagnose and fix the tiller pilot problem, and also had a very nice sail to Wrabness and back. As a result they have agreed to sail to the Netherlands with us in September.

In the meantime Sam and I spent several weekends on board, not sailing but just enjoying being on the boat.