I find that the Windpilot is sufficiently light that I can dismount it easily...
So do we!
We had a Windpilot on the back of Mico - our 33' Alajuela canoe stern cutter and battling a 30kt head wind for 14 days on our first blue water from Brisbane to New Caledonia, I happened to glance at the wind vane and noticed that not only was the vertical blade moving side to side but also the rest of the unit.
Hanging over the stern, good lady with a terrified, vice like grip around my ankles, I discovered that I could hand turn all four of the 500mm thru bolts easily. We hove to, and I snaked head first down into the lazerette and around the back of the steering post with a torch to discover that all four bolts had sheared off. It was only the ancient sikaflex holding the unit in place.
I was kicking myself (though not while squeezed into the shape of a pretzel behind the rudder post) because only a month earlier when we were on the hardstand getting the hull resprayed it occurred to me to replace those original bolts (at least 15 years old).
As you can guess - it was one job that didn't get done.
Fortunately we had 3 spare bolts in our boxes of stores so in a 3m sea with rising winds and now rain, and at one o'clock in the morning - my good lady hung over the stern with our, only 14mm ring spanner in one hand and a caulking gun in the other, while I lay squashed up inside the lazarette trying to attach new nuts as she gingerly extracted each bolt and replaced it.
The job took almost three hours - two hours to replace the bolts and an hour to extract me feet first back out of the lazerette!
From that time on, our Windpilot has never been a problem, although I did make sure I mentioned it to her new owners a few months back when we sold her to spend more time on our 44' Antigua ketch based in Borneo.
Fair winds,
Mico/Australis