The Road to the Horizon

"Finding Dory", is a social community of cruisers who plan to cross the Atlantic (East-West) next winter (2025-2026 season). It is "free-to-join" and "contribute-as-you-wish" group of yachties, bonded by one common goal: to cross the Atlantic safely. "Finding Dory" is organized in collaboration with Helena and Steve from "Noforeignland". You can read about the background, purpose and setup of this group, and planned free webinars in this post on Noforeignland - which will also guide you how to join this Whatsapp-based community.

So,... we are ready to kick off our fourth free webinar on Sept 8th at 20:00 Rome time (18:00 GMT).

I am SUPER stoked about this webinar: Not only because of the topic, "Weather and Weather routing", which is of crucial importance for transat sailors... But what makes it even more exciting, is our guest presenter: Julia Andrys. Julia is a professional meteorologist AND fulltime cruiser herself.
We've got a winner's combination here :-)

The outline of the webinar:

Introduction to the Trade Winds

Weather Models and Weather Apps: understanding their strengths and limitations

Weather FAQ - clarifying common misconceptions about weather and forecasting:

Trip Planning:

Our webinar will be held on “ZOOM” and consist of +- 60 minutes of presentation, followed by 30 minutes (or more if needed) of open Q-and-A/discussions/shared experiences amongst the participants.

Our webinars are free for all “Finding Dory” members. We will record the session and publish the link to the recording afterwards to all members of our community.

The instructions on how to join this webinar, are distributed to "Finding Dory" members only, rather than widely distributing the link via social media, mainly to avoid spammers to join in, and disturb our webinar.

So, if you want to participate in the webinars, first join the "Finding Dory" community. Via our flotilla's Whatsapp group, we will send you details for each webinar. Instructions on how to join the growing "Finding Dory" flotilla on Whatsapp, you can find in this Noforeignland blogpost.

About Julia:

Dr Julia Andrys has worked in weather research and forecasting since 2012. Julia’s work and research focuses on long range weather forecasting and climate modelling, in the application of weather and climate data across other research fields, including agriculture, forestry, and renewable energy. She has extensive experience in high performance computing, utilising supercomputers to deliver high resolution weather forecasting and climate data. A significant portion of this work involves the testing and optimisation of weather models. As such, Julia has a deep understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the many weather models used by the sailing community.
Julia and her family have been fulltime liveaboard cruisers since 2016, sailing well over 20,000 Nm and visiting 25 countries (check out their journey so far on NoForeignLand by searching for the boat name Mila). Julia loves to share her knowledge of climatology and meteorology with fellow cruisers, providing education, training, and offshore weather routing advice to anyone with the time to listen.

About Peter:

I will be the moderator for this webinar, as part of my role as "house keeper" for the "Finding Dory" flotilla community. I love both fast and slow sailing. I like staring at the stars during a quiet night in the middle of the ocean, but also like the spray hit my face while racing at 20 knots... As a retired UN staff, I now spend most of my time, in mentoring or training sailors.

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