Hey Jon,

Did I ever tell you when I was buying the boat, I asked the woman I bought it from what, if anything, she'd change/improve, etc. on the boat --just to pick her brain a bit. (This girl was a mountaineer, and had planned to take the boat through the NW Passage, maybe to winter over if needed --that's why she bought Sputnik; she also had had a full knockdown en route from Bermuda in a tropical storm in 1999, spreaders in the water. And she also had very dark facial hair, approaching a adolescent boy's proto-moustache, so, er, tough was she...tough.)

I asked her if she'd put a dodger on the boat. (As you know, Sputnik didn't have a dodger before last year.) She looked at me, laughed a bit, and said, "A DODGER?!" LMAO! True story.

Well, we've got a sprayhood kind of thingie now...homemade, alas (I have a dream of making a lightweight hard dodge out of Divinycell foam core board or something, following those s.s. coaming things around the cockpit...one day...yeah, right! Would be pretty nice to have for the high latitude trip one day...but then I'd have to convert to mid-boom sheeting...and...ah, f*ck it

Jud

Sewing chafe protection on the aft edge (boom chafe)...