Dear Les,
Sorry about the delay in
getting this to you, but our schedule has been totally hectic. It is hard to
imagine -- Light reading two hours a day, heavy reading one hour, 90 minutes
for breakfast, two hours for lunch, 30 minutes for a nap, 60 minutes for music
appreciation, three hours procrastinating, two hours for dinner, one hour on
the Internet and so forth. There is hardly time to sleep.
As for the following item on
Alpha, I want it to fit the right objectives re Alpha. If the tone isn't on the
money or it is too harsh, let me know. I am very willing to retool it so that
it is appropriate.
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Should you select an Alpha
autopilot for extended cruising in remote locations thousands of miles from the
United States?
The answer is no.
The reason lies in the
miserable service that Alpha provides to its customers.
We have used an Alpha 3000
on our Freedom 39 since 1997 while cruising fulltime on the west coast of
Mexico. It is a solid and generally reliable piece of equipment. However, when
it broke down, Alpha representatives virtually stood in the way of getting it
repaired.
We called them from Mexico
(no international 800 number was available) and described the problem
(overheating and shutdown).
None of the suggestions in the
skimpy manual worked, we said. Can you tell us what the cause might be, we
asked. Nope, was the reply.
Can you tell us how we might
we figure out a solution? Nope.
Can you fax us a schematic
or tell us how to disassemble the unit? Nope.
The only response was to
tell us to ship it back. I explained that we could do that, but returning it
could be a major problem in Mexico, that entire marine diesel engines have
disappeared in transit to Mexico from the US. They would not accept
responsibility for ensuring that autopilot was returned successfully.
The discussions degenerated.
At one point, the Alpha representative, whose name has been mercifully
forgotten, hung up on me.
Our ultimate solution was to
wait until we had an opportunity to return to the US for a visit. Then we
shipped the unit to Alpha and asked them to return it to a US address. We
carried the autopilot with us when we flew back to Mexico.
The problem is that the unit
appears to be sealed in some sort of proprietary fashion. One very experienced
marine engineer who looked at our unit said he would not attempt to repair it
without some indication of the correct approach. What that means is the unit
can only be repaired by Alpha. For cruisers even in Mexico, that is a problem.
It takes time, money and luck to be sure you get parts back from the US. In the
South Pacific or other remote areas, it is even worse. Say, for example, you
are waiting for a weather window in November to sail from Fiji to New Zealand,
and the unit breaks. Sending it back to the US means you will have to remain in
the cyclone belt during the cyclone season or hand steer 1,000 miles over a
very nasty stretch of water. Not the kinds of choices I want to make.
My recommendation is to find
a sturdy, simple autopilot that be maintained and repaired any place in the
world. Leave the Alpha to casual sailors, who may be willing to leave their
boats idle for weeks waiting for Alpha to protect its proprietary product.
David Jensen
S/v Hopalong
Mainland Mexico
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