Aleria's Adventures

PredictWind Fleet tracker - some of the cruisers we helped Last month, Alex and I, along with several other OCC members, were recognised by two awards for the work we did in supporting sailors who were being threatened by border closures around the world as the pandemic spread. The first was the Royal Cruising Club which awarded the OCC their Medal for Services to Cruising. That was a very special bit of recognition coming from the RCC.   The second award was the OCC Award given to Alex, me, Moira, Tim, Fi and Guy. We all worked to help cruisers stuck in various places, being stopped from reprovisioning and taking on fuel and water, and facing hurricane and cyclone seasons in the wrong places. We basically helped people make their own decisions about what to do and supported them with safety back up when they did.  We were really honoured to be recognised for this work. It was really rewarding to be able to help so many people and it really did keep us so busy that we didn't have

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

Busy, busy. busy times. An article that cited me was published in the Guardian yesterday. Written by Susan Smillie, it documents the plight of cruisers stuck in paradise. The BBC World News editors got wind of the article and asked me to do an interview with them in the morning, which I did at 7:20 am. Now anyone who knows me, knows I don't do mornings very well. But somehow I think I managed to do okay. They've posted the clip online and are sharing via social media. It's 3 minutes long and answers a few questions about what people are facing out there. This afternoon I did an interview with a reporter from Bermuda who is writing a story for publication tomorrow. I also answered a query from a woman wanting to do a documentary about the cruisers. And I forwarded a request for crews to film their voyages for an adventure movie being made about the subject. It's been an interesting couple of days.

After being on the Ocean Cruising Club (OCC) Committee as the Chair of the PR & Digital Communications SubCommittee, I also took on environmental programmes or citizen science initiatives and an effort to create a series of papers on Best Practices in cruising. Things calmed down and we stopped hearing complaints daily. In fact, we started hearing praise. When the Chair of the Awards Subcommittee stepped down, I was asked to co-Chair the subcommittee with Jenny Crickmore-Thompson. There was too much on my plate and it wasn't fun, so I wasn't unhappy to give up a portion of it, though I still maintain the PR aspects today. An opening came up for a new flag officer, and I was convinced by several Board members to run for the office of Rear Commodore. I wasn't sure that was a good idea, but they convinced me that the OCC needed my level headed thinking. I fell for it. I won the seat uncontested. My first act was to write a paper to the Board proposing rationale why

We were back to Kinsale for the second weekend in a row, this time for the Ocean Cruising Club (OCC) Irish Dinner. It coincided with the Cork/Kinsale Jazz Festival, so we made a long weekend of it. Nearly 70 members and guests arrived from all corners of Ireland, including as far off as Norway, France, England, Panama, and the US. Just about everyone had another reason for the visit and used it as an excuse to come to the dinner. The weather had been awful during the week, with torrential rainfall on some of the days. But it was promised to clear up for the weekend and, by golly, it did as told. We arrived in Kinsale and checked into our Airbnb at about 7 pm having been delayed by bank holiday traffic. The Trident was booked out early; it was fine, as we had stayed there the weekend before. Our Airbnb was right behind the yacht club so we couldn't be better located. I had reserved dinner at Cru which turned out to be as good as the Black Pig. We had two starters and split one