Aleria's Adventures

Me hobnobbing with friend and Artic explorer Jarlath Cunnane and CCA Commodore Chris Otorowski We attended our first major ICC event post-Covid, and I must say it felt rather normal. With about 250 people in attendance whom we hadn't seen in several years, there was a lot of hugging and kissing. I truly hope we don;t come down with anything, but no one was particularly reserved and there were no masks worn, even by the ancient contingent.  Commodore David Beattie and Aoife had things well organised and the Radisson Blu in Sligo did a great job accommodating all of us. It was nice that our drive was only about 2 hours this year. Next year, it will be in Cork, 5+ hours distant.  As always, it starts out with an informal New Members reception on the Friday night, when the whiskey barrel is brought out for members to imbibe free of charge (dangerous!). The Mayo contingent was out in force and we even inducted a new member from Westport we hadn't met before. The next day, we had bo...

I previously wrote about being a speaker at the IS Cruising Conference. As a participant, I was fortunate to hear talks on other subjects, most notably the recent interactions between Orcas and sailing vessels off the Iberian coast. I've written about that before, as I am fascinated by the behavior. Fortunately, we didn't have any encounters ourselves on our return from Galicia in 2019.  Mónica González, Marine Biologist with CEMMA - Coordinadora para el Estudio de los Mamíferos Marinos, gave a talk at the Royal Cork Yacht Club in Crosshaven on the 11th of March 2023. She presented a great deal of information now available on the Orcas that have been interacting with sailboats in the past few years.  CEMMA and Orca Iberica have identified 15 orcas, of the resident population of 35 remaining animals, that are taking part in the interactions. Monohull sailboats were involved in 80% of reported incidents. It appears that the interactions, particularly with spade and double-spade ...

Predict Wind fleet map for all the boats in the OCC Atlantic crossing group I was invited to speak at the IS Cruising Conference. The topic was to tell the tale of OCC's pandemic response effort. Gail had read about what we had done and thought it would be a good topic to cover as many of our IS members who come to this conference are offshore sailors. I had 20 minutes for the talk and 10 minutes for questions, so I didn't have a lot of space for something that consumed our lives for the best part of a year. I wish I could include the slides here, as it's a documentation of how we helped hundreds of people trying to survive a pandemic under very trying circumstances. When I finished, I asked Alex to add his thoughts about communications, which was valuable. Then I asked Vera to come up and talk about her perspective of having been in the Caribbean and being one of the families we assisted with their thinking. Walking them through options and giving them advance notice of br...