Day 5
Started at 5am – dawn patrol, couldn’t access Eglin Airforce Base beach where 90% of our ebb drifters beached, so we had to come up with an alternative plan – get them from the ocean with the waverunners
9 am – nearshore drifter deployment, 100 drifters deployed!
11 am – start ebb drifter recovery – 2 wave runners and the blue water. This was slow going, but effective. Waverunner would zoom in and out of the surf zone with a swimmer to grab the beached drifters
12 pm – 100 drifters start moving to shore
1230pm – Miami truck stuck on beach
3 pm at the farthest possible spot (ie 2 hours from our house) on the Airforce property getting our last drifter, Miami waverunner died.
330pm Bluewater and NPS waverunner assist with water recovery of the 100 drifters
4pm NPS waverunner heads back owing to low gas, assistance sent for the Miami waverunner
430pm Bluewater returns
2-7pm – recovering drifters from the beach and in the dark
Bulldozer pulling truck out of the sand
7pm – Miami waverunner rescued and transported in the Uhaul
8pm – everyone back eating pizza and drinking beer
930pm – passed out
In the end, we lost 5 drifters mostly from thieves.
Just another day in the life of a physical oceanographer.
UPDATE:
The next day we got up early and recovered the remaining beached drifters! Woohoo! The rest of the day was spent charging batteries, downloading 1 Hz drifter GPS data, fixing waverunners, and testing our aerial vehicles (quad chopter and helokite will be used for surfzone dye deployments planned for Monday).