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