The Road to the Horizon

Each season, our "Finding Dory" flotilla, assembles cruisers planning to cross the Atlantic (East-West and/or West-East), under the motto: "Crossing the Atlantic by yourself does not mean you cross alone!". Our flotilla is free for all skippers and crew to join, as long as one actively engages with the community.

Apart from our lively Telegram chat group (our main coordination tool), we also organize regular webinars to help our fleet prepare and plan their crossing.

We are now ready to kick off this season's 4th free webinar: "Weather and Weather routing for an E-W transatlantic crossing" on June 29th at 20:00 Rome time (18:00 GMT).

I am SUPER stoked about this webinar, not only because this topic is of crucial importance for transat sailors, but because I will be joined Julia Andrys as our guest presenter. Julia is a professional meteorologist AND fulltime cruiser herself. Julia who will present the "broader scope and background" of the weather systems, patterns and tools. I will join in with some unique historical crossing data and practical tips, based on my previous 8 transats.
We've got a winner's combination here :-)

The outline of the webinar:

Introduction to the Atlantic weather systems and 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 +- 90 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 am the moderator of the "Finding Dory" flotilla, and will join Julia as co-presenter in this webinar. I crossed the Atlantic eight times, on different types of boats, ranging from typical cruising monohulls and cats, to larger racers.

As a retired UN staff, I now spend most of my time, in mentoring or training sailors.

"Finding Dory V", is a social community of cruisers who plan to cross the Atlantic (East-West and West-East) during the next season (2026-2027). It is the 5th year we organize this "free-to-join" adhoc group of yachties, bonded by one common goal: "to cross the Atlantic together, safely". In the last season, we had over 400 yachts participating in our flotilla.
"Finding Dory" is organized in collaboration with "Noforeignland" (NFL). How to join the Finding Dory flotilla and get the details of our webinars? Join our Telegram chat channel - details in this post on Noforeignland. That post also has all details on the background, purpose and setup of our flotilla.

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