As I stated, my experience as well as that of many cruisers I've met, many who have gone around the world, is the opposite of yours. Unless you have met and experienced all that I have, how can you say I am completely and totally wrong? I believe you and your experiences.

My statement "windvanes are complicated devices with dissimilar metal parts, fragile pins, joints and couplings, underwater stainless welds, etc" is not wrong and can be proven by looking at the most common windvanes. Does yours have any underwater stainless welds? Any joints or couplings? Any dissimilar metal parts?

My meaning on complicated was not in setup or usage, but in engineering. There are things to break and things to maintain on windvanes and they too have failure modes.

BTW, the complicated compass swing of an electronic AP consists of turning your boat in a circle - one time only. You don't even need to turn the boat - you can just turn the compass around by hand. And this does not even need to be done for the autopilot to operate - it is done to fine tune the rudder response and so that the chartplotter, etc has accurate heading information. It needs to be done once, and never again for any software updates. If yours is different, you chose a bad model.

And I simply don't follow your logic that because electronic AP's require setup, this negates my statement that "windvanes require maintenance and do break at times". My brain is twisting trying to understand the relationship.

And I'm certainly correct that catamarans, highly reactive boats and high speed boats cannot effectively mount or use a windvane.

I haven't used a windvane much in my life, but do not believe that they steer better than an electronic AP with a rate gyro, strong, rugged drive and advanced computer. Ours steers the boat in bad and changing conditions much better than I can. They respond faster, adjust to conditions, predict the needed response, apply counter rudder in advance, operate on more degrees of movement and have stronger linkages. Sorry, but you will need to point me to some references or make a good physics argument to prove that one to me.

Mark