Things that Work or Do Not

During our trip back to Washington State we had some work done on Nikita, the big item was getting the autopilot to work correctly. The autopilot would turn off and on at random intervals. I need to back up though. We had been dealing with two systems that were giving us fits, firs the SSB and second the Autopilot. Both of these systems were not working when we took delivery of the boat. However, upon advise of the contracted electronics firm (the same one that installed the wrong size regulator on our DuoGen and caused the fire! and yet remains nameless) we were assured that both were working fine.....

After two months of trying everything on the SSB, calling Icom, calling Hallberg Rassy, we finally found a gentleman (owner of Elco Electronics in Boston) to come and look at the SSB - 20 minutes later after switching the SSB and DSC antennas we had a working SSB, he was embarrassed at the ease of the solution and charged us a nominal fee. If in the Boston area with need of electronics work please send your business to Elco. Now one could argue I should have been able to discern the same problem.... or well anyway this was a big deal as the SSB is our primary communications tool, including sending this blog update via email.

With the Autopilot we were able to work around the issue using other control methods, but still was annoying. The yard in Stamford was asked to look at the issue and discovered a fluctuating current at the autopilot controller, after shipping to Raymarine and having it reinstalled it works perfectly and nice relief.

So while knocking on lots of wood, crossing fingers and praying I am not putting a jinx .... I think we have everything working as intended. I guess that was the whole point of a shakedown cruise over the summer, I would just have preferred the shake down without any problems!

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