Aleria's Adventures

Our encounter with a fin whale bigger than our boat I don't know about you, but I get really excited every time I have an encounter with a wild animal and for some reason, whales, dolphins, porpoises, and seals make for the most magical encounters. I've been fortunate enough to have crossed the Atlantic several times and had ideal conditions for viewing cetaceans. I've written often about our encounters but I didn't have a good visual reference for identifying who I was meeting out there with any certainty. A stunning new user-enabling reference book is about to be released that will change all that for anyone sailing in European waters. My review of the book, Europe's Sea Mammals , follows. I can't wait to head back out to sea with this on board.

They say that the best day for boat owners is the day they buy their boat and the day they sell it. For me, it was the day we set sail across an ocean on her. Now I say, "Parting is such sweet sorrow, let us part 'till it be morrow."

Click here. A dire United Nations report, based on thousands of scientific studies, paints an urgent picture of biodiversity loss and finds that habitat loss and climate change are both amplifying the danger of widespread species extinction including our own. Released on May 6 in Paris, The UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’   is very direct and the most damning evidence that man is at the root of this evil.  This  landmark new report, the most comprehensive of its kind from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), makes a strong case about how humans are causing damage to the natural world at an accelerating pace. The interconnected web of life on earth is shrinking. More than a million species are considered to be threatened with extinction. The number 1 cause is not climate change but habitat loss, although climate change is one of the other main factors at work.

Being along with the ocean is liberating My friend and I were having a lively conversation which drifted into sailing. I am a sailor and she is not. I was telling her about how exhausting a conference for long-distance sailors had been, as there was something to do and people to be with almost every minute of each day. I told her when the Ocean Cruising Club weekend was over, being an introvert, I needed a full day of silence and no camaraderie to recuperate. She laughed and said, "It must be a challenge to get a roomful of introverts to join in on a social event, assuming that introversion is a trait that would inspire sailing across oceans."

Image borrowed from Cruising Outpost , now again Lats & Atts I wrote a blog post some time ago which caused multiple friends to write to me how much they enjoyed reading it. It has to do with the loss of ambition, and replacement of ambition with contentment, especially as it relates to sailing but also in general. I have often examined the psychology of different aspects of sailing and voyaging, and I wonder if it’s a topic that should be explored more deeply.

Conwy Castle  We parked the car, did a quick reconnaissance loop around the town of Conwy, then stopped into what used to be the Bank of Conwy for a pint. Lovely building - nice atmosphere. Afterwards, we had a pizza dinner with Malbec wine in the restaurant at the Bridge Inn and went promptly to bed. Alex was getting a cold and I was exhausted. We had a long ambitious day coming up.

Cyclone Fani approaching India May 3, 2019. I'm reading Mary Robinson's book Climate Justice and thinking about the awful cyclones that have hit Mozambique and India. Cyclone Kenneth struck while Mozambique was still struggling to deal with the impact of Cyclone Idai. In India today, a million people were evacuated from coastal areas, and 2.5 million were being evacuated from Bangladesh. Fani is the first tropical cyclone of the year in the northern Indian Ocean, and the most powerful to occur there since the cyclone of 1991 in which at least 10,000 people died, hence the emphasis on evacuation. It is also the strongest to occur so early in the season. A lot of people live along the vulnerable coast.