July 11 — Day 4 — Mattituck LI to Stonington CT 28 NM

 The winds in Long Island Sound run more or less east and west. This makes for great sailing with fast, comfortable easy, beamy reaches for those going north or south. But those like us transiting the Sound, are going east or west —  with the wind on the nose or on the tail. Yesterday it was on the tail but not enough so we had to motor. Today was the same direction but strong enough and we sailed virtually the whole way once out of the two mile creek into the Sound. It was a 7.5 hour total passage with speeds gradually diminishing from more than six knots to three as the favorable tidal current wore off.  The difficulty was that with wind behind, the danger of accidental gybe exists (we had a few) and this was compounded by the failure of autopilot, AGAIN!  After working fine all day long yesterday, today the same error message and the same cause. While underway, Lene was at the helm for about 1/3 of the time and we were on the phone with Raymarine tech reps for quite a while. They informed me that the famously strong sticking ability of 5200 glue was wasted because the type of plastic involved (Vinyl?), is so slippery that nothing sticks to it; “That’s why we cold press the pin into the plastic”. They said that they had never heard of the problem we experienced before. They offered to express mail a new replacement part and after we selected Stonington and contacted Dodson Boatyard to get the correct mailing address our night’s destination was thereby selected. But Dodson now charges $125 plus tax for their moorings, so we are anchored behind the seawall, as we have done in the past, in company with some pretty boats including “Brilliant”, 62 feet long with a draft of ten feet and a group of about ten young people aboard.

This shot from the chart plotter shows us at a moment.

The white boat shaped mark at the center of the concentric rings shows ILENE’s position, at 2:13 pm, the time being the bottom entry in the data bar at the left. The thick arrows pointing from our bow shows our course over the ground and speed at that moment 079 degrees magnetic at 5.8 knots of speed over the ground. Those are in the data boxes to the left' and the speed in a shield on the arrow itself. We know that in an hour we will be where the points of the arrows are 5.8 NM away, and hence that the rings are 2.5 miles apart because the arrow heads are slightly more than two rings away. The blue box with the X near the end of the arrows is the waypoint, the point I am aiming at, and the data dox to the left shows Distance to Waypoint as NM. The waypoint is the passage between North Dumpling Island, pictured here, 

and South Dumpling Island. The Dumplings mark the west end of Fishers Island Sound, the water between the mainland(Connecticut) and Fishers Island, the yellow land south of it. Stonington is in the NE corner of that Sound. We can easily zoom in to see the details of any sub area- miracle of modern electronics.

The problem with the autopilot is the little pin jumping out of its pit.

It is such a tiny part; it reminds me of the poem about for want of a nail the horseshoe was lost and in turn the horse was lost, the rider; the battle and the Kingdom was lost. This tiny part may cost us the cruise if we can’t get it fixed.  The connecting rod lies around not doing its job, lower right, in the next photo. The pin should hold the longer threaded rod in place at the end of the lever like part on the left

My friend Dean suggested “lashing” it in place, though acknowledging the difficulty of maintaining the freedom of the rod to rotate on the ball. In the middle of the night I woke with eureka idea. Not lashing but fabricating a plate to be fastened above it, leaving room for rotation of the ball but keeping the pin from jumping out of its pit. Tomorrow’s task.

Someone once described cruising a sailboat as the art of boat repair in foreign ports. I’m hoping to not make a habit of such repairing.