Hi all,

We are in the home stretch - should arrive Newport tomorrow morning!

Yesterday we had the spinnaker up for a few more hours as we sailed towards the very busy shipping lanes heading into metro NY. Luckily we have AIS, a system that shows the location, speed and course of the really big boats right on our chart plotter at the helm. It's sort of like playing Asteroids, where you have to dodge all the incoming dots on the screen.

Then the winds frustratingly backed from W to NW and then finally to NNE - not helpful. And then the seas got very choppy as winds built to 20-25. So much for the forecast of 15-20 knots from the NW. So it was an ugly, bouncy night and we didn't get much sleep. Actually Jen didn't sleep at all during the night, but she slept for about 6 hours solid today.

Today has been much better - we had to motor quite a while but the seas have calmed, the sun came out and the winds finallly are in the right direction. Right now we are about 40 miles off of Montauk Pt at the eastern end of Long Island. We spotted a few whales yesterday, one of them spouting very large plumes of water high into the air - haven't seen that before.

We'll send out a final update tomorrow - talk to you soon!

Scott & Jen & Grant & Amelia

Weds June 30
1600L
N40 29.8
W72 22.4
COG = 095M
SOG = 5-6 knots