Aleria's Adventures

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...

We are shortly giving a talk on heavy weather sailing at the ISA Cruising Conference . I recently came across my diary from our first Atlantic crossing in 2008. I was reminded that the markets collapsed while we were at sea. As all we had was an SSB radio, we didn't really know about anything happening in the world, so it didn't matter. We sailed north from New York to Canada and then set off for Westport, Ireland from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Herb Hilgenberg was our weather router and Matt aboard s/v Ault was the only other sailor in the northern North Atlantic. That it turned out to be Matt Rutherford is a whole other story.