Aleria's Adventures

Zeta making landfall on the Yucatan peninsula As post-tropical cyclone Epsilon heads toward Iceland and we get socked with abysmal weather -- heavy rain, hail, sleet, lightning and thunder, gale-force winds and 10-metre waves -- while the Yucatan gets hammered by Zeta, the 27th named storm of one of the busiest Atlantic hurricane seasons on record, I thought it would be good to examine the season so far, even though it doesn't end until November 30. Projected path of Zeta after the second landfall Zeta made first landfall late Monday just north of the ancient Mayan city of Tulum with maximum sustained winds of 80 mph just 20 days after Delta, a category 4 hurricane, hit them in October. It's the third named storm in one month to make landfall in Quintana Roo!  Zeta made landfall again in Louisiana as a category 2 hurricane which would make it the 5th named storm to hit that coast this year.  It’s the 11th hurricane of the season. An average season has six hurricanes and 12 nam...

Billy Brannan being rescued by tanker The Atlantic crossing season has come to a close and our last vessel assisted spent 54 days at sea. It's a long story but I've written it up  elsewhere , so I won't repeat it here. But here's a tally of outcomes during the 2020 pandemic return to Europe.  We estimated about 900 vessels were in the Caribbean in 2020. About 300 returned to the US with the Salty Dawg flotilla. Another 200 signed up with the OCC Atlantic Crossing group on Facebook, and about 190 ended up crossing. There were more that crossed on their own and the rest remained in the Caribbean in Antigua, Grenada and the ABCs.  In our group, we followed 103 on a PredictWind tracker. One solo sailor with only one arm sailed all the way home from St. Maarten to Ireland nonstop because his crew could not get to him. We were with him by email every step of the way. Numerous urgent and distress situations were assisted, and disaster averted. These included two steering failu...

This article was originally written and published by me on the Ocean Cruising Club website. I am posting here as well just to keep from losing it.  Main Photo (c) Caroline Dobbs. The vessels departing from Antigua (left to right)   Nebula, Fathom   and   Balou , all UK registered and heading home. Pandemic in Paradise  Daria Blackwell  |    27/05/2020 As reports of Covid-19 outbreaks began to circulate, the OCC was monitoring the situation in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and IndoPacific regions. What could we do to assist stranded cruisers? Reports from China of a highly contagious novel coronavirus began circulating in January. But China was far away from most places in paradise. At first, tourism remained active and cruisers went about their business blissfully unaware of the mounting threat of a pandemic. As tourists flying in from severely affected European nations began to show signs of infection and coronavirus began to spread...

This time last year, the Atlantic was chock a block with tropical storm activity. This year, as we head into peak season, the silence is deafening. We got our first TS remnants yesterday as Ernesto came through, dumping lots of rain but otherwise fairly benign. Friends had thought about spending more time in Ireland, arriving around next week but I advised against it, as the west coast in the autumn can be very wet and windy as the TS barrel their way across the Atlantic towards our west coast. Was I alarmist? Possibly. So I looked up what the 'experts' were saying .

Seaweed, Sargassum, sargasso, Heterokontophyta ... different names for the same thing - more than a nagging nuisance, a potentially serious health hazard. It has been clogging beaches in the Caribbean, causing distress to locals and loss of tourism. The boats in the Volvo Ocean Race struggled in the Sargasso Sea this year. VOR even compiled the best  video footage  of the sailors struggling to stay free of the weed.

Yesterday, we addressed a conference of about 100 cruisers at the Irish Sailing Cruising Conference. In 2008, on a crossing of the north Atlantic, we encountered six gales and managed to avoid one strong storm. What we learned then, we were here to share about our experience with storm management. The conference was summarized overall in Afloat magazine . Following is an overview of our talk: