Boat Electronics Quiz

If you’re a boat electronics whiz, here’s your chance to perhaps outshine the tech folks at Raymarine. Here’s the deal: The Raymarine Autohelm 6000 autopilot that has worked so reliably for us on Profligate for 12 years has, for the last year or so, become unreliable in a consistent manner. Specifically, when first turned on, and for about the next hour, it acts like it’s on crack. The helm is erratically jerked from one side to the other every few seconds, and eventually veers way off course in one direction or the other. Yet after about an hour, and with absolutely nothing else having been changed, the autopilot mysteriously becomes our perfect little friend, responding accurately to our every gentle touch. This has happened the last 25 or so times we’ve used the cat, and is maddening.

We contacted the tech folks at Raymarine, but they weren’t particularly helpful. Their short reply to our query was along the lines of, "We have no idea what’s wrong with your autopilot. Buy a new one — they have many more features than your old one."

We’d go out and buy a new autopilot if money grew on seaweed like it seems to for the government, but it doesn’t. Besides, we’re totally old school, so the only feature we’re looking for in an autopilot is for it to steer the boat where we direct it to. We assume that we’re going to have to buy a new autopilot, but we thought we’d throw the problem out to our readership is see if anyone has any thoughts on why our old one acts in such a consistently peculiar manner.

UPDATE: Thanks for all the responses to our ‘quiz’ — we were overwhelmed by the response.