This is going to be a fairly short one. We’ve adjusted the watch schedules to reflect our passage West and I need to sort out a better time to post I’m supposed to be sleeping now!

About Time Redux

Well our Ship’s Time is now completely at odds with reality. When we started this journey the 0600-0900 watch was supposed to be the Sunrise watch with no real night sailing as the sun was rising around 0600. Today it rose somewhat after 0830, ship’s time.

The trouble is we’ve sailed a couple of thousand miles West, crossing a few times zones, and now everything is out of synch. The result is we’ve had to shift our watch schedules forward a total of three hours over the last few days, in order that the first Night Watch actually happens in the dark and the Morning Watch doesn’t.

No changes to ship’s time yet, that would mess up the logs but we’ve moved the watches.

Speaking to Furuno

Well this whole autopilot incident has really, really changed my opinion about Furuno as a company.

Last Friday when the autopilot failed after working with the Mamba drive unit for three hours I sent off a lengthy e-mail to Furuno support.

I detailed everything that happened with the error messages, all the tests we’d done with the new and old autopilot processor and drives to determine there were no problems with the drives. And I also CLEARLY spelled out the urgency of the situation and that we were (at the time) 1,500 NM from land on a passage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The only thing I didn’t have was the exact model of the Whitlock Mamba drive which I update in an e-mail from them.

This morning I called Furuno, later I got an e-mail back about the submitted incident. They’ve been closed all weekend, and with Memorial Day weekend they weren’t dealing with support calls or e-mails until Tuesday.

The callwas fruitless. I confirmed what I already knew that I’d have to completely reset and reconfigure the autopilot to have any hope of clearing the error code. That didn’t work by the way, Furuno was explaining to me that my drive must be causing the error (it was working fine from what I can tell) and then the sat phone cut out. I didn’t bother to call back.

Even more appalling was the tech support e-mail. With all the detailed description of the problem and the stated urgency of an off shore failure in the middle of a huge ocean passage I got the following response: