Hey All,

After struggling against this miniature eddy field over the past few days, Dave and I have decided to take the way point to the North to see if we can salvage some speed instead of flying straight through this unfavorable current.

Although at the surface we seem to have a favorable current, which is then confirmed by our location due to surface drift during data transfers, subsurface, we are still dealing with the eddies that have slowed us over the past two weeks. We hope now by taking Challenger to the North, we can try and head off these eddies and take a route a little over a hundred meters to the north that we hope to ride to the north west on our way to St. Helena.

To the north, Silbo continues to fly across the Mid Atlantic Ridge.  Here, we have discovered something ver peculiar:  there seems to be an inertial oscillation as we cross the peaks of the subsurface mountain range!

We will investigate further over the next couple days, but the change in current direction seen by Silbo seems to match up well with the ridges, possibly an occurrence similar to the updraft airflow over the tops of mountains seen in aeronautics.

On another note, I would just like to congratulate Dr. Antonio Ramos on receiving the RUCOOL Technical Achievement Award for Cyber Navigation! Our good friend Antonio and his team at the University Las Palmas Gran Canaria have been working hard creating the 4-D Visualization tool Pinzon that allows us to see the marine conditions around RU 29 in both space and time.

Antonio will be visiting Rutgers the first week in May to meet with the Ocean Observatories class and to accept his award.

Force Wind Sea & Honor!