As Antonio criticizes my flying by saying “my three year old nephew can draw straighter lines than that!!!” Challenger pushes along the third wing of the windmill as we sample the eddy field within the area outside of the Brazilian Exclusive Economic Zone.
Antonio also reports that it looks like the eddy has shifted out of our range of the sampling zone as the system moves to the north. As we make our final pass through the area, we have Ru29’s course set to fly to the north west in preparation of entering the Brazil current which should carry us to the south west along the South Brazil Bight.
Dave lately has been running numbers on our engineering parameters for this flight in comparison to the mission from Cape Town to Ascension and Silbo’s crossing from Canaries to the Caribbean as those two missions done by Slocum Gliders of similar magnitude. On our pump, we have done close to 12,000 inflections averaging out to roughly 17 per day meaning we should have about 470 days left. We have also had a very low number of oddities from the sensor monitoring the pump and only a few on the previous mission. This should be a good sign as while Silbo was in flight across the North Atlantic there were a number of oddities leading up to the crippling pump failure that left the glider drifting for the latter portion of the leg that ended upon recovery in Barbados in August 2013.
Looking ahead, this will most likely be our last wing of the windmill as we will begin heading in towards shore for our recovery. The plan at this point is that a team will head down to Brazil May 12-22 to our Brazilian partners in the recovery. Being that we have just a month and a half before that window and that we would rather be safe than sorry, the feeling at base is that we are better off arriving with some time to spare and loitering off shore.
Force Wind Sea & Honor