Originally Posted by
Capt Kremmen
I sail small boats. The most useful bit of kit I have is an auto pilot slaved to a GPS. It frees me from the tyranny of the steering wheel in almost any kind of weather.
I was very impressed with one of those devices on a yacht I got to ride in for a few days. Tell it to follow the magenta line, and it just did exactly that - magic!
Until, that is, we came across some rather bigger seas, whose frequency seemed to induce positive feedback in the autopilot's control loop, which threatened to roll the mast out of the boat. So we turned it off and steered with the tiller by hand, and bloody hard work that was too!