Sometimes it’s just simple…

Yesterday, I watched my husband on the phone with B&G technical support for the third time this past week.  Why was Hugh needing their help? - On December 15h, he installed the latest software update to our B&G chart plotter.  A few days later we went out for a day sail.  It was a perfect, and beautiful day for sailing.  Warm, sunny, perfect wind, & light seas.  The sails were up, and music on.  We engaged the auto-helm, ready to sit back and relax, but nothing happened - Ugggh!

Why the Ugggh?  Last summer, we had an incident in Key West, where our rudder was damaged, and had to be replaced.  After leaving Key West to head to The Bahamas, we noticed a little knocking under our feet at the helm. Hugh figured out that the Key West contractor had not taken just a few minutes to turn a couple of screws to fine tune the steering mechanism.  Hugh took the cockpit floor apart, fixed the issue, and all was fixed.  We continued sailing and made our way to The Bahamas.  Hugh gets more valuable after every successful project.

Fast forward to a day sail after installing the latest B&G chart plotter softer:  Hugh makes 2 calls to B&G and, spends several hours on the phone with no luck fixing the auto-helm.  Having not heard back from B&G who were “investigating” the issue, Hugh places a 3rd call to their technical support.  This time a gentleman named James answers the call and, tells Hugh he is with their “deep” support.  After a couple of hours, James suggests removing the cover to the B&G NAC-3 auto-helm computer and, to make sure that there is proper voltage on the 3 pairs of wires connected to the unit.  I see Hugh go into our stateroom where the auto-helm computer is located, and then back up to the cockpit.  Less than a minute later he is raising a thumbs up, and yells out, “I fixed it!”.  I asked Hugh “What did you do to fix it?”.  Hugh said that after he removed the cover to the auto-helm computer, he noticed that one of the wiring connectors was not properly pushed into its’ slot.  Our best guess is, truly no idea, other than just rigorous sailing!     

Here are two pictures showing the “after” and “before”:

After, in the proper position.

Before,” rudder does not engage”