{"id":7847,"date":"2026-07-13T09:08:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T13:08:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/?p=7847"},"modified":"2026-07-14T09:33:03","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T13:33:03","slug":"problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/?p=7847","title":{"rendered":"When Solving One Problem Creates Another"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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We left Edgartown late morning to allow time for weekly Monday morning business calls, and to catch a favorable current as we headed West on the Nantucket Sound toward Newport, Rhode Island, our next stop. The first half of the sail was great with calm seas and 18 knots of wind to the beam (the side of the boat, an optimal point of sail in terms of speed and comfort). But when we cleared the protection of land west of Cuttyhunk, despite forecasts to the contrary, we encountered big chop and the wind veered to the West. Despite competing wind and seas, we finally made it into Newport Harbor.<\/p>

Newport is one of the busiest harbors in the world. There are boats and other obstructions everywhere. This is not a place to fly blind. Well, we flew blind. Just as we entered the busiest part of the harbor, our fluxgate compass pooped out. This meant that the electronic navigation instruments could no longer determine our heading (direction), true wind speed, and other important pieces of data. This also meant no autopilot. We have a redundant compass, but we didn’t have time to switch over.<\/p>

We managed to navigate the obstacle course of the harbor without calamity, and to fix the problem once we were tied up on a mooring but we remained unsure of the root cause. We called Bill, an Amel expert who supports Amel owners around the world. His first question was, “Is there any ferrous metal near the compass”? Well, of course we know better than to place metal objects near a magnet, right? Not so fast. Remember a few posts back when I wrote about buying a temporary dorm fridge as a backup for our onboard fridge that was on the blink? Well, guess where we put it… right over the bilge (under-floor storage area) where the navigation compass is! I had noticed some strange heading data over the last few days, but the compass still worked. The compass has the ability to self-correct for minor deviation errors. The failure occured when we made an acute turn into Newport Harbor so the latest hypothesis is that the self-correction failed due to the nearby fridge, tripping the error we observed.<\/p>

Conclusion… anybody need a brand new 3.3 cubic foot dorm? We’ll give you a great deal!<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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\n\t\t\t\t<\/path><\/svg>Prev<\/span><\/span>Previous<\/span>A Sad Day in Maine<\/span><\/span><\/a>\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\tNext<\/span>Aux armes, citoyens !<\/span><\/span><\/path><\/svg>Next<\/span><\/span><\/a>\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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What does refrigeration have to do with navigation electronics?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7850,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2026-new-england"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7847"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7874,"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7847\/revisions\/7874"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}