It's great to hear someone is starting building the boat that I could imagine as our next boat (if/when we have one). 

We're currently living a land-life after spending 4 yrs cruising from Boston to Brisbane Australia on a Catana 48 with our teenage boys which we sold as we got here in 2015. We're not sure if we'll go cruising again, but if we do, current thinking is it would be on a Cruiser 50 or 60 that we built ourselves. I've spent a bunch of time chatting with Rob who lives just an hour away, but we are not at the right place with our personal lives to start building and planning for cruising again (yet).

So I'm very interested in following along with your build and then experience on the water. Your goals seem to match what ours would be - light but comfortable, fast, easy, long distance cruising. You seem to have a very similar list of still to be resolved cruising fit-out questions to mine - bimini, autopilot, electrical, plumbing, etc.

I've spent some time thinking about these, in particular the complexities of an autopilot on a shunting boat, but come to no real conclusions. I do have a somewhat similar technical background, originally a software engineer, but now more focused on the business and marketing side of medtech startups. So if you're interested in floating ideas and discussion, count me in. 

We might also be able to trial some ideas here as one of my sons is currently helping Rob build the Marshall Islands demo boat, and I believe it is going to end up stored on a trailer in our driveway! Roan's an engineering student, so modifying it to test ideas with Rob's help is definitely a possibility. I think the plan is already to try the latest new rudder system after initially launching with just a steering oar.

With respect to autopilots, have you come across this open source autopilot project: https://pypilot.org/ ? It might be a basis for an autopilot that understood how to sail in both directions and maybe even shunt? For long term cruising, I'm a great believer in a rock solid very functional autopilot as a crew member. Being able to push the gybe button and have the steering taken care of while managing the spinnaker lines single handed was a big plus on our last boat. Similarly, having an autopilot that could shunt, while I took care of the sails on a HP would be a big plus, though obviously not absolutely required.

Regards,

Mark.

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