Irish Sailing Cruising Conference 2023

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 breaking news to come. 

Perhaps the most interesting is that we all commented on how this brought it all back. Humans are very good at committing negative memories to history and minimizing exposure to their negative influence. 

A couple of days ago, The Washington Post ran an article about "Science of forgetting: Why we’re already losing our pandemic memories". The author posits that because of information overload and the monotony of pandemic life, your brain may already be forgetting parts of the covid years. And it's true. I had to look up what we did because I couldn't quite remember the details. Was my mind suppressing it or was it just overload that the brain cleans up? I'm not quite sure, but either way, it's about self-preservation. 

Let's not forget all the stuff that kept us alive though, especially the vaccines. The next one is lurking out there. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/03/13/brain-memory-pandemic-covid-forgetting/