"cavelamb" wrote in message
m...
Hi Ed,

The Typhoon is a sweet little ship.
Was yours the day sailer or cabin job?

Cabin. It slept four VERY friendly people. d8-)



Close hauled or broad reaching, my 26 can steer herself - providing the
rudder
is tied down and not free to swing back and forth.

That's accomplished by trimming for a neutral helm - in this case,
slightly
under sheeting the jib, or over sheeting the main - either way works.
I prefer to over sheet the main rather than letting the jib luff (and
flog!?)

Whatever works. The Typhoon has, roughly, a 7/8 rig, so it will behave
differently from a modern design that has more relative area in the jib.


And that works pretty well for a shoal draft wing keeled boat.
It wanders a few degrees back and forth, but generally stays where you put
it.

I've been mostly just tying the tiller down with a piece of line to the
stern
rails. Two loops around the tiller - pulled tight - will hold it under
moderate
conditions - and has just about worn a ring through the varnish there.

The down side is that it takes time and attention to set up.

I often sail solo (during the week while the rest of the world has to work
)
so something that can just drop in place without having to be rigged would
be
a blessing.

The autopilot (Otto) is pure temptation, but it takes power (and has to
have the GPS up and running for compass information) and it takes time to
acquire and set up. Operating it manually - bump the buttons back and
forth
trying to set it where you want it also takes time and attention and
somewhat
frustrating trying to make fine adjustments.

So mostly, I've just tied off and not bothered with it unless I have
plenty
of sea room and need to be away from the helm for more than a few seconds.

But once set on course, Otto can be turned completely off and still hold
steady!

So what I've thought all summer is - what if I had a simple manual jack
screw
that would drop in place of Otto?

But my mental image was just that - a direct replacement of the electrical
device. One end of which would need a pretty tight tolerance rotating
thrust
bearing - hard to cobble up with bear claws and stone knives.

A few comments by clever people here replaced that with a (drum roll
please)
turnbuckle!

It was just a matter of letting go of the obvious solution and allowing
a simpler one to take it's place...

I'll be interested to hear how it works. BTW, a friend of mine who had a
Ranger 26 sailed her solo all the way down the coast to Florida one year,
sailing mostly outside rather than in the Intracoastal Waterway, using a
tiny wind-vane self-steering rig that was so compact that he just left it in
place all the time, unhooking it when he wanted to man the tiller. Rather
than a vane, it was one of those "flapper" deals that had a near-horizontal
pivot axis, and a small flapper that hung just behind the transom. It has a
very large mechanical advantage over vane-type steering, although it's more
limited in the amount of tiller travel it can accomplish.

Those things can work very well. I'm leery of electro-mechanical systems on
a sailboat, anyway. Too much tech for me.

--
Ed Huntress