Published 04/26/2025
Up about 5:30, we went to bed early. Breakfast and underway by 7:15 am. Very calm. Bible reading underway.
I have been noticing that our autopilot tends to not quite get us where we want to go. It is marginally “OK” but tends to wind up about a half mile to starboard over about 5 miles tracking. Today was a perfect day to address this. Flat water, wind around 3 knots, 5 miles off shore. So, I called Raymarine tech support and asked for help. Thy said “swing the compass” I said how? And they walked me through the process to do that, now I am checking It is doing much better now! That took about a half hour or so.
Now, about the speed through the water probe….. it is an Airmar DST 810, marketed and recommended for my Raymarine Axiom chart plotters. Well, it reads low probably about 1 knot, based on the GPS speed. Since it is a paddle wheel that depends on water causing it to spin, I am not looking for it to be 100% accurate, but the true wind speed calculator in the chart plotter uses the speed through the water. I don’t know why it doesn’t have an option to use the speed from the GPS, but oh well.
In any case, the directions for calibration direct downloading an app from Airmar to calibrate the probe. I can’t find it on the App Store, and when I go to the webpage for Airmar, I sometimes get to the AppStore and a message that says not available for download in your area. (We are in Mexico, so that might be it?).
I called for help, and was told the guy that knows this stuff is out today, try back tomorrow, but that he usually asks about software updates on the phone. I was at 18.3, and the latest is 18.4, so not very far out of date. I updated the software and was able to download the app. Now I have to go through the process of calibration, the first step requires the boat to be still (not what we are doing now). So, it will wait for this afternoon.
