Ryk wrote:

I was chatting in the yacht club bar last night about course keeping
at night, and how hard it can be to steer a tight compass course, and
how variable you get steering to other indicators like wind and stars.
Today that leads me to wondering about whether a tight course is
particularly valuable with modern instruments.

An autopilot can steer a much tighter course than I can. So in any
reasonable open water (i.e. not in a very tight canal or coming into a
dock or something), we let it steer. Like someone else mention, we
don't have it hooked to the GPS.

Yes, a tight course is important near shore or other hazards, and
essential in traffic, but is it necessary out on open water? 15
degrees of wandering costs less than 4 percent in course made good and
few cruisers put the effort into trimming sails that efficiently. A DR
track can only be as good as the course keeping. Are there other
reasons than DR to try to steer a tighter course?

The long distance cruisers use wind vanes instead of autopilots
because a) they don't use any electricity, and b) they don't have any
electronic parts to go bad. The disadvantages (as I understand them)
are that they do wander a bit and they can't be used in some
conditions. I think one uses a tiller pilot in those cases, but I'm
not absolutely clear on that.

grandma Rosalie