For all you folks who are convinced that you are inviting imminent catastrophe to let your 8 kt trawler be steered by an autopilot through an ENS system, I sincerely hope you never get on another commercial aircraft. Having spent two-thirds of my life racing around the sky at 340 kts in multi-million dollar airplanes carrying countless passengers, I just have to tell you that on almost all flights you'll go on, the auto-pilot will be turned on out of 1,000 feet and the crew will couple the auto-pilot to whatever nav receiver the plane is equipped with, and then they'll sit back and -> MONITOR <-- the progress of the flight. If the weather is bad at your destination, the auto-pilot may stay on through the entire approach to the runway. In some cases, if the aircraft, the crew and the approach system at the airport are certified, the auto-pilot will land the aircraft in 0/0 visibility and may not be turned off till the aircraft has almost come to a stop. ^From having trained hundreds of pilots, I can safely say that VERY few people can manipulate more than two things at a time, and LOTS of people have trouble doing more than ONE thing at a time, but MOST people can MONITOR up to a dozen things with ease. It is precisely in high-stress situations where you need all the help you can get. Because of where we cruise, Lil and I travel in fog a lot. We have a very good radar, a very good auto-pilot, and a very good computer running the auto-pilot through The Capn that's getting a DGPS signal. We load a pre-proven route into the ENS (a route we've run before in good visibility to verify its accuracy and clearance from obstructions). We set the radar to Head-Up display and The Capn to Course-Up, and couple the auto-pilot to the ENS. This allows us to confirm what the chart shows on the ENS with the radar. Also, each waypoint from the route appears on the radar screen as we progress along the route. It's Lil's job to match up anything even remotely in our course. If we can't correlate the two views, we stop or slow down till we get it figured out. It's my job to monitor the whole process. If any of the three tools fail, it's immediately obvious, and, depending on the situation, we can either carry on with what's left, or not. At 8 kts, we have tons of time to evaluate and make decisions. A failure of one or two, or even all three of the tools does NOT create a crisis situation. In a trawler, you can just stop or maintain station until visibility improves. If you're in a shipping lane when failure occurs use time, speed, distance to get out of it. The point is, if you find yourself in a dangerous position when you lose GPS signal, then you most likely shouldn't have been doing what you're doing in the first place. Have we ever lost GPS signal? Of course! Maybe 20 times in 4 years. So what? The ENS shows a huge GPS failure warning and the auto-pilot beeps at you till you reset it. You'd have to be blind, deaf or asleep not to be aware of it. We have cruised some 4,000 miles a year on Voyageur for the last 4 years, and will be doing at least the same distance again this year. I would estimate that 85% of the time, the auto-pilot is coupled to the ENS. Are there times when you absolutely shouldn't be running coupled? Of course there are and common sense should dictate, but even those times, you're probably still safer to leave the auto-pilot on but uncoupled because you can direct more of your attention to the hazards surrounding you. I can't for the life of me fathom what the maker of the AutoNav auto-pilot is talking about. I would most certainly buy another brand cause the guy seemingly doesn't understand the interface necessary to make a safe ENS system. An ENS system coupled to a good auto-pilot steers at least as well in almost all sea conditions, and sometimes better and more accurately, than either Lil or I can, and it doesn't get tired and lose concentration. Anyone who tells you that coupled system is responsible for his boat having run aground is full of it. The responsibility lies with the human that was supposed to be monitoring it and the boat's position. I know apochryphal stories are fun to rehash, but if you haven't tried running coupled, then please don't knock it until you've given it a fair test. That's just my opinion, I could be wrong. Now to retreat back into our cave... Mike & Lily O'Reilly Voyageur, GB-42-1311 Portland, OR