Ahoy Sailors!
Another week living in a COVID-19 world, and another week of storm clouds on the horizon and uncertainty in the future. These weekly corona updates are becoming a habit!
Before we dive into it, I want to acknowledge and thank everyone who has emailed a reply - I have only responded to a few of you, but trust that I have read ALL of them, and will respond where necessary in due time. So thanks for your patience.
Northbound?
Time is ticking on ISBJORN and ICEBEAR leaving the Caribbean safely before hurricane season. It's not looking good, I'll be honest. If you missed it, ISBJORN skipper August Sandberg did a really interesting podcast interview with Sean Westoby, who is the interim-skipper on ICEBEAR at the moment, living aboard the boat on anchor in Grenada on a strict quarantine. Sean has a first-hand perspective on how this is affecting sailors in the Caribbean right now, and on how he's been passing his time alone on ICEBEAR. And in today's episode, Brian & Karin from DELOS sent in an 8-minute update on how the coronavirus has changed their own cruising plans - they're currently going on 54-days-and-counting on anchor off the grid in the Ragged Islands of the Bahamas. You can find both on my ON THE WIND podcast. I take comfort in the fact that we're ALL affected by this, but it still sucks. I find myself longing to go back to sea again, and I still might, come July, bringing ICEBEAR across the Atlantic, but those odds are falling fast.
I have no updated concrete news on the northbound passage timeline or route (whether we'd be able to stop in Bermuda, for example), but trust me that you guys will be the first to know. We're still taking Skeleton Crew emails if you want to join last minute, so keep them coming.
Thanks again for remaining flexible, and as usual, email andy@59-north.com with any specific questions. Don't feel shy in emailing me a reminder if you'd already sent something but I haven't yet replied!
Some Good News...Virtual Seamanship
In #notsailing related news, the team & I have been working hard to figure out how to bring some stuff online for everyone, and are very close to launching a new membership-based platform where we'll be posting inspiring & educational articles, LIVE seminar sessions & hangouts, and, eventually, multi-part workshops that people can complete on their own time. We actually have had this idea for a while, and began brainstorming it in earnest at last fall's All Hands meeting at our farmhouse in Sweden, but kinda have left it on the back burner. I've always said I don't want to dive into anything new unless we can do it REALLY well, hence the long runway. But, clearly there is no better time than right now to accelerate the creation of this, so HOLD FAST, it's coming soon (as in within the next 1-2 weeks). Note that the blog on the website & the podcasts will continue outside this framework and will always remain free.
Crew who have sailed with us in the past, or who have paid deposits to sail with us in the future, will get FREE access to the new platform, at the highest membership level, for at least a year. Anyone else can sign-on at a couple different levels, each giving access to different areas of the site. We haven't set pricing yet, but it'll be reasonable. The larger multi-faceted workshops will be available to buy ala-carte, pricing dependent on your membership level, but those won't be ready for a while, as they'll take time to produce. Of course we'll continue with our local in-person events & workshops, once we're safely able to do so.
We hope to launch in 1-2 weeks with a series of technical articles, a handful of videos, 'office hours' where one of us will be live online for Q&A's and most exciting, a weekly LIVE seminar/discussion touching on a variety of topics, including seamanship, navigation & route planning, splicing, safety-at-sea and more, each hosted by one of our sailors.
One of the first LIVE events will be a weather forecasting & routing discussion where we'll give the actual briefing for the BVI-Bermuda passage as if it were happening in real-time. Basically a virtual briefing of what the actual crew would have gotten onboard. We'll look at the big-picture weather patterns that create localized weather for that passage - Tradewinds in the Caribbean, frontal systems off the continent - analyze a variety of weather sources, pick a departure day and look at the sail plan we'd choose, then examine how it might affect our routing decisions once offshore. Then, a few days later, we'll do a follow-up discussion looking at the limited weather we'd get through the sat comms onboard, and decide if we'd need to alter course, change sails, etc. We're even going to get the REAL forecasts & outlooks from WRI, our weather routers, who have agreed to support us in this 'virtual' effort.
We'll continue these real-time weather briefings for each passage from both boats, as long as we're not able to actually sail.
The 2020 passage-specific LIVE sessions are primarily designed for those of you who might miss a planned passage due to coronavirus. But, we want to be able to offer them to a wider audience as well, so we're working on a way where we can make signed-on crew 'interactive' participants - able to ask questions, etc - while everyone else remains in the background as a passive audience, so to speak. Not sure technically how that will work, but stay tuned. If you can't make one of the LIVE sessions, they'll be recorded for you to watch later, and links to resources posted in a notes section.
This idea will certainly evolve over time, and we're looking to you guys to help us move it forward, once we get it off the dock, so to speak. If you have any ideas from the start, please send them to holdfast@59-north.com and we'll add them to our brainstorm notes!
I hope that the next email you get from me will be the announcement of this new online forum we're creating, OR that it's good news about us ACTUALLY sailing, but time will tell. Until next time...
HOLD FAST!
// Andy
