Helm Station

[cdflan]

Just a beautiful sailing day and as I reflected on how well the helm station has worked out, I thought I'd share the configuration.
To get from her berth to open water requires a westerly leg, northerly leg. westerly leg and southerly leg in narrow channels before reaching the bay.  Seems the wind is always against us on one leg of the trip and it is so easy to drop a hand to the throttle, push and off you go with the electric motor.

Tiller steering is so easy that it's worth the tighter squeeze in the cockpit.  The Forespar tiller extension is the lazy way to steer when I want to keep an elbow on the coaming.  To the right just out of the picture is a Tiller Clutch (with the blue/white control line fastened to the gallows uprights) which is great for short term holding a course to raise sail, coil lines, etc.  For longer stretches, the Raymarine Tiller Pilot does a wonderful job attached to the cockpit coaming with a removable bracket and to the tiller on a pin.  For manual steering, the pilot sits on a pin attached to the side of the tiller cutout (tip just visible) so dropping it on the tiller pin engages the autopilot and lifting it onto the cutout pin puts it on standby.
Ever so pleased as to how the boat turned out even if I do say so myself.

[Craig]

Horizon Cats rule!! Sail on!