Wind vane self-steering, why? Well, to conquer
the tyranny of the helm! Steering a sailboat on a long cruise means the crew can't do
anything else, and steering can be hard work. The wind is what propels us, so why not let it
steer too. There are many wind vane designs -- this is the "Cape Horn" integral servo-pendulum steering
gear, acclaimed the most elegant of them all. My beloved "Sailomat 800," now in the hands of a
fellow cruiser with big sailing plans, took me 10,000 miles without a complaint and entirely
hands off. Like most vane gears it connected its apparatus on the stern by a system of control
lines through the cockpit to a drum on the wheel. But, ah! The Cape Horn has no visible control lines. Yes, the Sailomat had a whole jazz band hanging off
the stern, and so do other popular self-steering systems. Did I say the Cape Horn is simply elegant? Yeah, but here's where the sausage is made--below decks in a hidden factory of hard working control lines. Here we are making our very first tack with
the Cape Horn-- a simple port to starboard. "We'll just force it around a little bit..." "without changing the lines..." To set the course just turn the
steering vane so it stands up straight, then tune the sail plan so it stays that way. "Well that works!" "...I know what's wrong." "I didn't trim the Genoa enough." "One of the confounding things about testing your
new wind vane in imperfect conditions like this is that there are gaps in the wind, in other
words the wind is blowing 10 knots one minute, it changes direction 20 degrees, it lulls down to four knots, and we have to be aware that the wind vane really
says, you know, what do you want me to do? The wind keeps moving around, changing its speed and
direction, and I'm just going to follow it. Most self-steering vane gears just bolt onto the transom, But the Cape Horn famously requires drilling
a big hole in your boat, something we are otherwise encouraged to avoid. Uh, you need to come down-- --How does that look? Uh, it's pretty good to me. Push your end down a little bit...a little more. Right there is level. Okay. yep I think we're gonna have to do a little filing... Okay. Yeah, Russ a little to that-a way--I'll take
this tape off so you can tilt the tube -- is that vertical? Actually they both are. Wow, that's because I'm standing in the cockpit... If I get out of the cockpit it'll be canted forward. For aesthetics I think that we should lower that so the tubes are horizontal, um, but but what was your point about the-- Oh, well--this fitting? See how they fit up against -- oh, that's right, the point was the brackets have to be... They're not flush to this... They're not flush to that... Is there a solution to that? Well, you
can, I was just thinking--You actually could put it on the vertical member -- yeah, vertical member
there, and we can extend this one a little bit more. [Sea lions barking] That'll, that'll fix him for criticizing our work. The Cape Horn is custom fabricated, since every
sailboat is different. The price of elegance is a system of quadrants, turning blocks and control
lines to be epoxied in place in awkward locations Dan and Kika of "Sailing Uma" have an
excellent installation video and I've written a candid account of my own job. I'll put
the links to both in the YouTube Description. So here's a wind vane performing pretty much the
way it should-- it's more or less straight up and down and we're sailing along nicely to windward.
We have 14 knots over the deck, that means probably 10 or 11 knots of wind and our boat speed is
six knots. And if you take a look at the sail, oddly enough the mainsail has a bit of a luff in it. Wind vanes are very sensitive to sail set. If you
were steering this boat by hand you would probably trim the main some more, which would make you heal over some more, which would make the rudder work harder, and it's a good question whether you'd be
going any faster. Let's see what happens when I trim the main to remove the luff. I just raised the traveler up about a foot from where it was before. We heeled over another few degrees And now the vane is holding on one side. It's not vertical very much-- because it's fighting the new weather helm
that I introduced by trimming the mainsail. Let's alter course a little to head more downwind. Good, now we're on a broad reach, just by turning the wind vane angle about 20 degrees. We're holding course pretty well and on a
broad reach with a boom out still further the vane has no problem keeping course. And dead down wind is the most difficult
course of all for self-steering vanes, but most of them do quite well, especially if we had a chance to wing out our Genoa jib, but
and I'm not setting the whisker pole today. To release the Cape Horn, just
disconnect the steering lines and lift the pendulum blade out of the water. And in fact, under these
conditions just around my home port, I would ordinarily just use the wheel pilot for this-- a little Raymarine device-- engage the clutch, push one button, and it makes you go in a
straight line without any of the muss and fuss of sailing a wind vane. Which is what we're doing -- always sailing the wind vane. In fact it feels more like sailing
the wind vane than sailing the boat. Wind vanes don't work when the wind dies,
specifically when the boat's speed drops below two or three knots and the moving air is no longer
sufficient to move the pendulum arm, and if it did move it, the boat wouldn't be going fast enough for
it to transmit its force to the quadrants below. This little fella never complains. It does squeak, and that's the result of some salt buildup from the atmosphere,
in here and there's a handy irrigation hole to do that. Just squirt some fresh water in once in a while, which stops the squeaking. Why, all things considered, push-button steering-- steering by the wind--no need
for the skipper to do anything. Essentially what we're sailing is a Tesla.
