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Mas Tequila

The Great Lakes Cruising club is holding it's Wilderness Rally June 28- July 1, 2017 at Harbor Island.

Please consider this a special invitation to join us at Harbor Island where you can visit with many North Channel cruisers.

If you are a member of the GLCC, the cost for the Wilderness Rally is $38.00 per boat and includes 2 shore meals and several shore activities including solar panels for boaters and open source navigation software.

Some GLCC members will be going west to Sturgeon Bay for the GLCC Rendezvous, but there will be boaters who will be heading East into the North Channel for their summer cruising. You will be able to join them and get a guided tour of many of the best anchorages.

Bill Matley
Co-Chair Wilderness Rally
Director
GLCC

More information you can PM me at babaganosh@comcast.net

Mike, the XTE is the cross track.  This is the distance your boat is "off track" from the course you originally put in to the autohelm.

Hitting the Reset XTE button tells the system to recalculate your course to the destination from this new point.

Perhaps a simple way to think of XTE it is to imagine you are in the 5th lane of a 10 lane highway (counting left to right).  If you drift to lane 8 you may still be heading toward your destination but you are 3 lanes off your original track.  This distance from lane 8 to the original lane 5 is the XTE (Cross Track Error).  The Autohelm will overstear to the left until your boat is back in lane 5. Resetting the XTE tells your Autohelm that your present position in Lane 8 is fine and it should navigate to your destination from Lane 8.

Veering off the 40 degrees you mention sounds like the "Crazy Ivan" maneuver we are trying to solve.

Bill Matley
Catalina 36
1252

I put a second power inlet in the anchor locker, now I use a smaller 25 ft (lighter) shore cable. I disconnected the rear stock power inlet connector.

I am planning to reactivate the rear power inlet and rewire it to 2 or 3"new" outlets around the boat.  In the cold northern Michigan spring weather I find I can't operate more than one electric heater at a time. 

The aft berth gets pretty cold at night so on those rare times when I have guests on board and we are at a marina, I can run a second power cord to power a second electric heater.  Otherwise, the short cord from the bow works fine and I don't have to lug that 75 foot monster cord any more.

Bill Matley

Just to add to the data base on this topic, I have also been visited by "Crazy Ivan".

My fluxgate compass is mounted in the storage compartment at the base of the mast.  (I have a Catalina 36 so my interior may be different)

I had replaced the fluxgate compass a few seasons ago so it is relatively new. I have an ST 4000 autohelm about 1993 vintage.

I get a Crazy Ivan (always to port) whenever I am in auto mode on a magnetic heading.  About 15 to 30 minutes after engaging the autohelm seems about the right time.  It happens on any point of travel but I do much more north and south as apposed to east and west.

It does not happen when I am in a "go to" mode of autohelm operation.  My solution is to place the cursor on my Raymarine C80 Chart Plotter, to a point I want to go to.  I engage the autohelm and immediately the chart plotter makes its initial course correction while I manually maintain a course that is very close to that shown by the plotter.  After a few minutes the autohelm makes a second course correction and then I engage the clutch.  In this mode I have gone 30 miles or more with out touching the wheel or the autohelm.

As soon as a crazy Ivan begins I disengage the autohelm clutch, manually correct the course and in a minute or two, the autohelm returns to the previous course.  The interesting thing is that when the autohelm starts a crazy Ivan, it try's to turn the wheel (and therefore the boat) much more to port than I let it, but seems to quickly accept the manual heading I hold, I does not "give back" what it takes from the original course.  I know this may sound a little confusing but if the crazy Ivan try's to turn the boat 90 degrees to port, if I hold the proper course manually by quickly disengaging the clutch, when the autohelm comes back to starboard it seems to know I am not that far off course and picks up the manual course (I reengage the autohelm) and it makes a few small course adjustments before all is forgiven and the original course is followed again.   

This small give back after a crazy Ivan doesn't smell like a magnetic interference or magnetic field fluctuation to me. It seems to be more connected to a GPS vs magnetic disagreement.  Since I get no crazy Ivan when in a "go to cursor" mode of navigation, I think that the Autohelm 4000 unit gets confused when both magnetic information and GPS heading information is available to it.

My question, does anyone know, will the Autohelm 4000 work without the fluxgate compass attached?  Won't the Autohelm just use the GPS heading information? 

Also, I am curious, is anyone having Crazy Ivan's with no chart plotter installed? 

My anchor light is an Aqua Signal Model 25, it's light bulb (a festoon type) burned out last year and replacement was on my spring to/do list.

Like others, I wanted a LED type bulb for all of the well known reasons.

I purchased a LED replacement from http://www.doctorled.com/f16.htm.

The bulb has a couple adapters included in the package and these adapters may have worked all by them selves but I chose to solder the adapters in place.

The result is a firmly attached bulb that I don't expect to ever have to repair again.

Do you wonder about the brightness of this single LED that draws less than 1 watt?

It is much brighter than the emergency lantern battery driven light I used last year.

It is much brighter than I expected and a very clever design.

I have found an excellent adhesive that could solve your waste tank repair problem. 
While some on this list have advised that you replace the tank, I'd give this stuff a try first.  You can always replace the tank later if you have to.

I discovered this stuff while trying to fix a crack in my hot tub shell. It worked very well, and has the amazing property of being able to bond to PVC and Polyethylene as well as vinyl plastic.  It is flexible when dry and bonds under water.

What more could you want?

Try some Mr. Sticky!  http://www.a-a-i.net/uwguses.htm

If the crack is difficult to get access to, I have another solution that sounds crazy but will work.  Go out and buy several (4 or 5) cans of cayenne pepper.  Mix the pepper into a bucket of water and try to get the mixture into your waste tank, as close to your leak as possible. Let it sit overnight, and the pepper will flow to the leak and plug it up.  I have used this on my hot tub leak and it worked but you have to do a major clean up to use the tub.  The pepper patch didn't hold up and the leak returned after a few weeks. But in your waste tank, under very little pressure and with no circulation to wash the pepper out, it might do the trick for quite a while.

I was told this cayenne pepper trick used to be a mechanic favorite for repairing radiator leeks. I don't see why it wouldn't work in a waste tank.