October 31, 2014
Can anyone help us explain this? We have come into Suva Harbor three times now and all three times, our autopilot has failed upon entry to the harbor. It’s never failed at any other time in almost three years of use.
OK, to be fair, the first time our autopilot solenoid packed it in about 10 miles before the harbor. Understandable. But the other two times, we got an error message, the boat made a hard right and sent us scrambling to get it disengaged and the boat back on course. Both of those times, including yesterday, we just restarted it and all was fine from then on.
(The error message was “rudder position sensor error.” The rudder position sensor is hard-wired on the NMEA 2000 bus – not wireless in any way – eliminating the possibility of a super-secret, autopilot failure beam from a high-level Fiji research lab.) -Rich
Note from Cyndi from the future, reading back over the blog in 2019: It was Suva that was haunted.
