Wind vane or autopilot?

Conventional wisdom was that for offshore cruising, a wind vane self-steering gear was the first choice and for inshore cruising and short trips you used an electric autopilot. In recent years, numbers of cruising boats have been setting out for distant shores with just an autopilot as the self-steering gear of choice. In an informal survey of yachts at anchor in Papeete in Tahiti a few years back, I counted only five wind vane gears among the 20 yachts in the anchorage. Since all of them had arrived from Europe, it’s fair to assume that autopilots were used by the majority to steer the boat. I knew at least a dozen of the boats there and all of them relied on autopilots.

I have used a wind vane gear on the long-keeled , 31 foot LOA and as sweet as you get for that 1960s era of design. It had a trim tab on the transom-hung rudder coupled to the wind vane and worked fine with the wind forward of the beam but was unreliable with the wind aft of the beam. I also tried a German made WindPilot (not the same as the present day Windpilot) with a vane direct to a separate