Bermuda Triangle or another @#$%! Raymarine product failure?

So there were were in the Abaco Islands preparing for our passage back to the States when Jen turned on the navigation system and noticed that our wind instrument was not working... AGAIN. This time it was the wind speed piece of the instrument. We'd already replaced the system twice, once for a bad wind vane and one for a bad base unit. I checked wiring, etc down on deck and found nothing wrong, so up the mast I went looking for trouble at the masthead connection. Sure enough (and happily) the problem was with salt water in the connector at the masthead. Salt water at the top of a 65' mast you wonder? Well, we "enjoyed" some breezy weather at times over the winter, especially in January, and the sea spray evidently gets everywhere. A little compressed air and WD-40 (wonderful stuff) later, the water was chased away and the unit was working properly. Don't ask me why Raymarine has such a lame connector on such an exposed piece of equipment. I can tell by the design that I'll be up there many times doing this maintenance.

Anyway, the day before departure, our Raymaine flux gate electronic compass that is hooked up to the autopilot (Francios) seemed to be askew. The GPS, our old fashioned compass and the sun all agreed we were sailing East, while the electronic compass insisted we were sailing South. "Hmmph... that's not right" Jen said. I was somewhat less civil in expressing my feelings about the matter.

The next day we spent a half hour motoring in painfully slow circles to re-swing the electronic compass. With it pointing in the right direction once again, we turned Northwest towards the Gulf Stream and the US.

That night, sometime around dark o'clock, the compass started playing games again, only this time it was completely lost. Instead of just pointing in the wrong direction, it would slowly swing around westerly, counting down around all points of the compass, around and around and around. I started thinking about those old Bermuda Triangle movies where boaters/pilots experienced spinning compasses. Yikes, what next, a rotating time-warp tunnel and UFOs? Strange things seem plausible at night in the middle of ocean. I glanced up to confirm our trusty old fashioned mechanical compass was behaving properly, which it was, and the hairs on my neck laid back down.

Jen suggested that rebooting the navigation system might clear things up. No such luck... at first anyway. After powering up, the compass resumed it's sedate countdown around the compass one or two more times and then picked a random heading and stopped. 8 button-presses later I had the thing realigned to read in the correct direction and our autopilot was functional again. This happened about a half dozen times throughout the three-day passage. Our first warning would be a beeping error message from Francios, followed by the boat rapidly veering off in one direction or another.

I suppose it's likely to be a bad connection (crossing fingers here) or a faulty Raymarine compass, not aliens or spooky geography or Atlantis. While we're here here in Charleston, I'll check out the connections and then get Raymarine on the phone... again.