Every October my yacht club has a Fall cruise to Avalon, on Catalina Island, which my family and I try not to miss. October is the best boating month of the year here in Southern California, because the crowds are small and the weather is usually gorgeous. My own motto has always been that you never leave for the island on a Friday (especially after work on a Friday afternoon). So I was heeding my own advice to a point by taking the day off and getting out just after dawn instead of the afternoon. But it was still a Friday.

The wind was already building, even at that hour, but it's only 26-miles across and less than a two-hour trip for the 52-foot Ocean Alexander I was "testing." Now my wife and I had a horrible crossing a few years earlier in our own 31-foot Tiara for another Yacht Club cruise. We figured we had a bigger and better boat this time and it couldn't be too bad with the wind just beginning to build.

So off we went. We stuck our nose out of the jetty and sped up to 19-knots pointing towards our waypoint off on the horizon. It was clear and we could easily see our destination, but I like to put a waypoint in anyway for the TTG information and to track the autopilot.

Not 10-minutes later, my wife and son were back down in the saloon and I slowed down to about 15-knots. This boat was brand new and didn't have an enclosure on the bridge or a down station. The wind was right on our nose and was blowing the tops off the chop and right into my face. By the time we were midchannel it was blowing in the 30s, legitimate small craft warnings were being issued, the boat was getting hammered right on the bow.

Down to 13-knots now, the trip was going to be dragged out longer than we hoped.

The boat was loaded with Raymarine gear. With it's E-120 display, 4KW open-array radar, AIS, Sirius weather and every other option installed, I had the thing dialed in as I left the breakwater. It wasn't long after that that I dismissed the dash and main navigation displays completely to retreat to a more secure and dry corner of the bridge.

The track to the waypoint wasn't steering all that well with the swell and wind angle as it was, but more importantly I wanted to be able to quickly turn into steep chop if I got a little sideways and keep us from rolling too much. So I set the pilot in regular AUTO mode.

So there I huddled, keeping a close watch behind whatever protection the venturi could afford me from the constant dousing, clutching the AP6002 wireless autopilot remote. If I saw a particularly steep and off angle swell, I could push the button quickly a few degrees one way or the other and try to minimize the rolling or the pounding.

There was never any real danger if you just sat in one place and held on, but it was just plain uncomfortable and wet. I thought at least a dozen times on that trip that I could have lived without any other piece of gear on that boat right at that moment except for the autopilot. And the wireless remote paid for itself in one trip. I have said a million times that GPS is the greatest invention for boaters in the last 50 years, if not longer. But an autopilot is the first item I would install on a boat any day.

♦

Jeff McLaren is the National Sales Manager for Seawide Marine Distribution, a wholesaler distributor based in Southern California that works with all major electronics manufacturers. He has produced a series of instructional DVDs on how to use Raymarine navigation gear.