Love it or hate it: the difference between a good passage and a difficult one could very well be in whether your self-steering gear is operating efficiently or needs a rebuild.

We’ve used gear bought brand-new from the factory and gear that was tumbled around in a crowded garage for years and, while they both can be made to work, rebuilding old gear like our Monitor windvane self-steering can make a world of difference.

While at anchor off Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, we rebuilt our Monitor servo-pendulum self-steering gear.

Other than a broken rudder assembly, the Monitor has performed well. Credit: Dena Hankins and James Lane

Every bearing, every gear, every rod, and every fastener was either replaced or polished to perfection. The rebuild took a little more than a week and a whole lot of dedication.

It left us with sore hands and muscles from all the cleaning, polishing, and lifting.

Self-steering gear: a third crew member

A few years back, we pulled the Monitor out of a sail bag that had been sitting on our deck for a year, installed it, and named it LoveBot.

We then sailed our Baba 30 up, then down, then up and down the Atlantic Seaboard of the United States.

The rudder assembly broke while sailing from Nova Scotia (just after Hurricane Fiona) to Provincetown, Massachusetts, so we had it emergency-welded and spent the entire winter bopping on down to Key West, Florida, under sail with LoveBot steering.

From Florida, we crossed the Atlantic to Bermuda and the Azores with our LoveBot doing the lion’s share of the helming.

We put LoveBot to bed for the winter in Praia da Vitoria on Ilha da Terceira, then woke it up in April of 2024 and had it sail us to the Canary Islands via Madeira.

All these offshore passages, including the coastwise ones where we skipped large portions of the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW), were made far more pleasurable for the humans and feline aboard by the hard work that our valiant LoveBot put in at the helm.

The quick-fix repair was badly done; the rudder was misaligned. Credit: Dena Hankins and James Lane

LoveBot never tired, but it did get creakier as we went along.

Like that favourite uncle who can’t swing you around as energetically as he used to, LoveBot just got old.

By the time we decided to do a complete rebuild, we had no idea how many nautical miles this incredible machine had travelled.

We knew it had been backed into a dock at least once, removed from our 1984 Baba 30, reinstalled, and then removed again and tossed around a chaotic garage, all before it ended up in that sail bag on our foredeck.

All that happened to LoveBot before we reinstalled it and started our electric global circumnavigation.

Obviously, these are very rugged machines that can take a lot of stress, with or without the human elements along the way.

LoveBot was our third tried-and-true Monitor so we knew what a high-performing piece of kit we had.

We owed it to ourselves and to the technology to do our best to rebuild it and, wow, did we pull it off!

The pieces that were beyond saving have been stowed in the deepest reaches of the boat for dire emergencies.

That quick-fix welding we had done in Provincetown, Massachusetts, was a hack job that caused us much consternation and not a little worry for the year we used the old rudder after the ‘repair’.

The welder, who claimed to be a sailor, did not use stainless steel rod and misaligned the rudder in the repair process.

Meanwhile, the decades-old bronze gears had been worn down to a rather imprecise fit, and we knew we were losing ground with every sloppy steering adjustment.

Self-steering gear: a question of balance

The whole rebuild in Lanzarote was a labour of love and patience. The first trip afterwards was a test of both. A new Monitor is adjusted at the factory so that the air vane, when pointing straight up-and-down, turns the water paddle directly forward and aft.

That creates a neutral position because the water flows at the same speed over each side.

Getting the air vane to point straight up is job two when setting up the Monitor self-steering gear under sail (job one is trimming the sails for ease on the helm).

When the air vane tips, it twists the paddle, and the difference in water pressure pushes the paddle to one side. That pulls the attached control line, which pulls the tiller (or wheel adapter) to steer the boat so that the air vane is pointing straight up again.

James and Dena stopped at Pozo Negro to fine-tune the Monitor. Credit: Dena Hankins and James Lane

In our previous article, we mentioned that the actuator shaft has a locknut at the bottom and that, if you’re not changing out the gears, marking the threaded clevis’s position will allow for easy readjustment.

Now that we’ve been through adjusting it from scratch, we can’t overemphasise that point enough.

In homage to the resilience and usefulness of this gear, even maladjusted, it could be coaxed to steer a course.

There was no safety margin, though, because it meant setting up the air vane to be pre-tilted and letting the wind raise it or push it down farther in order to steer… and there wasn’t much farther down for it to go with our newly installed gearing system.

Rather than limp along like that, we stopped at Pozo Negro on Fuertaventura, the next island west in the Canaries.

A monkey wrench and a crescent wrench later, we thought we had it dialled in…which was a bit of a guessing game given the fact that there are no documented metrics available for this kind of adjustment.

You just have to adjust and observe as you go, which is exactly what we did for the next 1,010 miles to Praia, the capital of Cabo Verde, on Santiago.

Eventually, when we say dialled in, we mean micro-adjusted to perfection to match the new gearing system.

It took one more round of monkey-wrenching to reach that perfect match between air vane and paddle angle, and then LoveBot steered about 98% of that leg of our electric global circumnavigation over 10 days, 8 hours, and 53 minutes.

Over a thousand miles of offshore cruising with our rebuilt Monitor wind vane self-steering gear, and the machine had once again proven itself.

We’d rediscovered the quickness with which a clean Monitor steers, and it was truly amazing the difference our rebuild made.

To the extremes

The only problem with the science was that the adventure between the Canaries and Cabo Verde was a downwind run the whole way.

Most people who are dedicated to maintaining the maximum possible velocity made good (VMG) by steering a strict course have some severe criticisms for the Monitor going downwind in light to moderate sailing conditions.

These people often turn to an electric autopilot that keeps their wandering down to a minimum, but we are less concerned with sailing fewer miles to our destination than we are with the comfort, safety, and enjoyability of those miles, or rather, velocity made bad (VMB).

Testing LoveBot on a real beat. Credit: Dena Hankins and James Lane

The sail from the Canaries to Cabo Verde involved the extremes of low and high winds, or as extreme as you can get without heaving-to, which we never had
to do.

For several days, though, we were double-reefed with the main only and broke every speed record this little 9.2m yacht has ever set.

At one point and for maybe a few seconds off the coast of the Sahara Desert, we were doing 16 knots in a massive following sea in the middle of the night while surrounded by a rush-hour traffic jam of ships exceeding 90m in length.

This gave us the confidence that LoveBot could hold a course even with the heavy weather helm of a main-only downwind run.

A delicate touch

After that, it was no surprise when the light and variable winds among the Cabo Verde islands demonstrated LoveBot’s new delicate touch.

LoveBot got thoroughly salty in those following seas, so our morning routine included spraying it and all the related blocks and tackle with fresh water from our garden sprayer.

Between the morning dew and a little flowing water, LoveBot remained limber, quiet, and responsive to every wisp of air.

Testing a system on two points of sail from one gybe to another for a thousand miles isn’t really science, so it wasn’t until we sailed from Santiago to Sao Vicente that we fully tested our rebuilt LoveBot.

James on watch – a relaxing experience while the Monitor steers the boat between the islands of Santiago and Sao Vicente in Cabo Verde. Credit: Dena Hankins and James Lane

From the Sotavento (Leeward) Islands to the Barlavento (Windward) Islands, we did something we usually try to avoid: sailed upwind on a tight close-haul. Beating between islands in the middle of the Atlantic offers the chop of the ocean, the current between land masses, and the traffic of civilisation.

We were not excited about the trip, but we wanted to see more of Cabo Verde and put LoveBot to the test.

Several days of beating and tacking gave LoveBot the chance to show us what it could do.

That previous mournful lament when under stress was completely gone.

The smallest flutter of the air vane translated into brief and powerful action on the tiller.

Best of all, after acclimatisation, we were able to cope with our own problems, like making food and comforting the cat, Beluga Greyfinger, while LoveBot kept us bang on course.

We’re passionate about mechanical self-steering gear as an enabler of long-distance voyaging.

Over the 1200+ nautical miles we’ve travelled since that rebuild, what pleased us most was the realisation that we’d been muddling through with a subpar system for years and that we don’t have to any longer.

Anyone who is frustrated with their self-steering gear, of any age and of any brand, would benefit from considering the two-fold fix: improving their sail trim and performing a complete and total rebuild of the system they already have.

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