En Route New London, CT 41°17.6N, 71°51.6W

I left Newport this morning, single handing towards New London, Connecticut. Right now I'm abeam Block Island heading west at 7.2 knots, riding the current beginning to flood into Long Island Sound. We're on our way!

It's been an eventful few weeks, the details of which will have to wait until some other time. For now, I think we're almost ready to head out to Bermuda and the Caribbean. We've got new storm sails, Spectra halyards, a watermaker and a liferaft (and ropes, books, clothes and foul weather gear everywhere). A few last minute jobs, most importantly food and a mounting bracket for our Jordan Series Drogue.

Given I'm single handing, I should probably keep a lookout rather than updating this (in truth, I do pop up every few minutes, and I am watching the radar and chartplotter in front of me) but there's one cool thing I've added to this site that I wanted to tell you about.

If you look in the top right corner, there is a new section called LINKS. Here there is a link to YOTREPS (Yacht Reports - see "where are we...") a website that superimposes our position on one of Google's maps. The exciting thing here is that we can update it via our single-sideband radio, so we can continue to send position reports even though we're well out of internet range. From here on in our access to the net will be infrequent, and certainly only when we are anchored at some destination.

Newport 41°28.8N, 71°19.5W

So we're in a bit of a holding pattern. We can't yet sail south (hurricane season doesn't finish until 1 November) and it's starting to cool down quite quickly. More importantly, we have a huge number of boat projects to complete before we head offshore. So for now we're in Newport, with periodic sails up to Portsmouth, as we knock items off our extensive and perpetually growing to-do list.

Here's an example: Bandit has a very tall mast, nearly 70' high, and we can carry a lot of sail. This is great in lighter winds, or when sailing downwind, as it translates into lots of power and fast sailing. However, when the wind picks up we need to act quickly to reduce sail area so we're not overpowered. To change gears we have several options: 1) we can tuck a reef into the main. Here you lower the mainsail reducing its area. We have three reef points, one shallow, the second quite large, and the third, a very deep reef for storm conditions; 2) we have two headsails. A ginormous genoa that's great for reaching and running (sailing downwind) - it's huge like a spinnaker - and is on its own furler. For stronger wind, and for sailing to windward, we have a 100% Solent jib on a separate furler. It's set up for self-tacking. We can reduce both of these sails a little bit by taking a few rolls on the furler.

So with a couple of reefs in the main, and a couple of rolls of the Solent jib taken in, we've reduced the boat's sail area enough so we're comfortable through about 30 knots of wind. But then what? What about 40 knots or 50 knots? I hope we don't see it but...

At this point we continue to reef the sails, but should the wind keep rising we need to go to storm sails; until now we've not had this option. So this week we bought a storm jib. It's only 102 square feet and we fly it from the Solent jib's furler (this of course means we need to wrestle the Solent off its track first). It's made of 9.5oz Dacron - a very heavy cloth.

We also wanted a storm trysail. This is like a tiny mainsail: we will run with 135 square feet (to put this in context, our normal sail area is around 1000 square feet!). Ideally, this sail is hoisted on its own mast track. You leave the sail on its slides at the base of the mast, then hoist it straight out of its bag when you need it - simple. Problem is, we don't have second track, so this week we've been talking to Southern Spars, a New Zealand company with a facility in Portsmouth, about what we can do.

The bottom line (in both its accounting and metaphorical sense) is that fitting a new track is hell expensive. For one, the whole rig needs to be removed from the boat - having done it before, it's a big job. Ultimately, we came to a good compromise: we're setting up a removable Spectra halyard. It'll attach to a strong point on the mast, lead to an existing fitting at the mast base, and we'll tension it with a large turnbuckle. Spectra, although rope, is as strong as wire. Southern Spars is putting that together for us now.

That's one of several dozen ongoing projects. Others include a liferaft, SOLAS quality rescue flares, perhaps a watermaker (we'd prefer a sauvignon blanc maker but haven't yet tracked down the details), lee cloths (to hold us in our bunks when offshore), software upgrades for our electronics and a Jordan Series drogue in case we get caught in big, breaking waves....

(yikes!)

The photos show Numbers, a local high-performance racing boat. Note the carbon-fiber sprit. Holding this (and by extension, the mast) in place, if you look carefully, is a Spectra line. The equivalent on our boat is a thick stainless steel bobstay. I figure if they can trust their carbon rig to a piece of Spectra, we can use it for a trysail halyard. The last photo is the bow of one of the local runabouts.