On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 1:10 PM, Mike Schuh wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> A bit belated, but here's a track of the SS Curt - I mean, Oscar Elton
> Sette:
>
> http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shipposition.phtml?call=WTEE
>
> Zoom out a ways...
>
> Looks like they're just about back to port.
The SS Curt is safely back in his Minnesota port. :-) Trying now to catch
up on everything after being gone close to 3 weeks. The Sette was scheduled
to go over to the fuel dock and refuel today. Then from there, they were
heading out for their next cruise. The full time crew spends 240 days a
year at sea, and during the cruise season, they are out most of the time and
only have a few days in port between trips ... and most of that time is
spent on repairs and preparations for the next trip.
I decided that although the sea can be beautiful at times, and is always
changing and always interesting, I'm a land-lubber at heart.
We saw a lot of neat stuff ... the ubiquitous albatros was amazing in how
efficiently it flies and how it seems to stay airborne perpetually, just on
the small lift it gets as the wind come up the front side of the swells. It
has an amazing ability to follow the contours of the swells as they
constantly change while keeping it's wing tips just centimeters off the
water ... I never saw any of them drag a wing tip even once.
On the last day we were visited by a boobie (that's a bird, although still
hard to explain that to the wife ... good thing we only saw one so I could
use the singular tense.) The boobie is the most aerodynamic bird with the
neatest lines I have ever seen ... it was fascinating! ... and that was
even before I found out the name. The day we saw it, the winds were really
light. It did a pass over our ship, caught the updraft over out bow, and
then returned for several more passes before it went on it's way.
We didn't hit the debris jackpot we were hoping to find ... partially
because when we got into the area we wanted to be at, we were completely
socked in with clouds and fog, so our satellite prediction model fell apart
with no current data. We hunted around the low tech way and saw lots of
fragments though in various concentration areas along the convergence
front. Lots of floats and buoys drifting around out there ... kind of sad
the amount of junk that is out there in these areas.
Our UAS was grounded all but a few days due to high winds and low
visibility. Once we got to the higher latitudes (like above 30-32 degrees)
the water got substantially colder and that's when we started hitting fog
and overcast and worse weather. I wished I had brought my hat and gloves
from Minnesota. When we dropped south, the bad weather followed us until we
got below 27 latitude which unfortunately was the furthest south the FAA
authorized us to fly. So we came back very disappointed in the small amount
of flying we were able to do, but greatly encouraged by how well things did
work when we were able to fly. And we gained a tremendous amount of first
hand experience, so that if we do get a chance to go back and do something
similar in the future, we'll be able to perform much better, even in the
sorts of adverse conditions we experienced (which are probably more typical
of the weather out there.)
Regards,
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson: http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/
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