Wally, My New Best Friend
28 September 2017
We all agree that "Wally" is our best crew member. He reliably steers the boat for hours at a stretch. He never complains, never loses his attention span, and, as the old joke goes, does not drink much of our beer. Wally is a mechanical windvane.
When there is enough breeze, I pull two pins from his mechanism releasing his rudder and his vane. I point his vane in the direction that I want the wind to be blowing at the boat and he takes over. He keeps us at that wind angle. This makes standing watch very easy. We have done very little hand steering on this cruise.
In order to help Wally do his job, we have to make sure that the sails are balanced. This means ensuring that the sails are not trying to turn the boat. This is accomplished by trimming both the mainsail and the jib so that neither is pulling he boat into the wind our away from it.
At one point, off the coast of central Oregon, we were in 20 to 25 knots of wind. We reefed (shortened) the mainsail twice to as small as we could make it and rolled up the jib to about 40 % of its original size. Wally just kept on doing his job.
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