First of all - Thanks to everybody for the comments and suggestions on the starter problem. It REALLY does help. Today we took the dingy to Anchor Marine to get some back up raw water pumps and to get a replacement starter/solinoid. The guy that runs the place - Mike - was fantastic. I explained the problem to him about the starter and he knew exactly how to fix it. I had tested the voltage going to the solinoid and was getting 12.5 volts - should be plenty. But I also checked it when it was hooked up to the solinoid and trying to start it and was only getting 4.5. Thats not going to do it! Mike gave me a quick and permant fix by installing another "dummy" solinoid that I installed between the ingition and the solinoid mounted on the starter. PROBLEM SOLVED. Oh happy days!

On the down side, I re-did all of the connections to the autopilot and even found a loose connection. We took it out for a test drive and it appeared to be working, but after some hard turns to port, it failed again. CRAP. I will take the parts off tomorrow and they will test them in their shop on Monday. Hopefully they can get it figured out.