Work under progress
Our Sailomat 760 came with us in the flight from Sweden and is now getting mounted. Exciting!
We received a lot of great feedback when we asked for advice on Cruisers Forum regarding two different windvanes from Sailomat and Windpilot - and after contemplating, we figured that the one from Sailomat would fulfill all of our requirements. What a great luck also that Stellan Knöös, the owner and designer at Sailomat believed in our project and wanted to support our journey with a great discount on the system. Looking forward to get it installed this afternoon and hopefully having the chance to try it out this weekend.
For all of you who're not into sailing (yet), I'll give you a simple lesson: This huge piece of metal is a self steering system, which allows us to sail in the right direction to the wind without having to actually steer the helm (wheel). Sitting by the helm all day long can be very exhausting and requires tons of attention and focus, therefore are mechanisms such as the autopilot and/or a windvane used. This windvane system will give us the freedom to do all kinds of other things when sailing long or short passages, instead of always having to have one person in the cockpit. The boat will simply sail herself along. This windvane steers the boat with a constant point of sail - which you will manually set for your boat when the perfect wind has been found, this unlike the autopilot - which steers a constant compass course with an electric steering motor connected to the rudder. /T